ABSTRACT
Manufacturing has the potential to damage human health and environmental quality, but current practice demonstrates that it does not want this to happen. Its preference is to eliminate or minimize the generation of hazardous substances. In addition, it wants to protect against whatever cannot be eliminated by minimizing exposure. Pollution prevention is a relatively broad concept because it applies to every human activity, and not just to chemical manufacturing. Green chemistry is about the chemical process more than the physical process. A rearrangement reaction is a broad class of organic reactions where the carbon skeleton of a molecule is rearranged to give a structural isomer of the original molecule. Oxidation-reduction reactions are used to control the oxidation state of a molecular species. The oxidation of methane to methanol, methanol to formaldehyde, formaldehyde to formic acid, and formic acid to carbon dioxide is an oxidation sequence.
