Milestone Green Technology

Think Green is a natural sequel of our former Think Blank book. By adopting a Think Blank approach we decrease the volumes and concentrations of reagents for improving blanks and consequently for reaching better limits of detection. Well, if we reduce the amounts of reagents we are by extension going green. In this sense, requirements for greening sample preparation procedures aiming trace analysis are proposed and discussed here. For instance, have you thought about energy needed for promoting and keeping the reaction system heated? What about reaction conditions for attaining efficient digestions? Have you thought about generation of too reactive or dangerous products? How about risks to the analyst and to the environment? In this book modern strategies for developing green digestions are presented and we demonstrated how available instrumentation allows us to reduce the use, to substitute critical reagents, and even how to recycle and reuse reagents.

The role of the analytical chemist has not changed since the inception of the discipline. However, the questions for which society wants answers have become more challenging. Instrumental analysis has continually evolved to keep up with the analysis demands, but sample preparation has failed to keep up with the evolutions of modern trace organic analysis instrumentation. In this book we discuss the importance of sample preparation for trace organic analysis. Part I focuses on the fundamental theory of extracting an analyte from a sample matrix, modern extraction techniques, and post extraction processing. Part II reviews modern instrumental analysis techniques as they relate to the sample preparation process and Part III discusses how advances in microwave technology bring sample preparation to the same standards as instrumental techniques. The goal of the authors was to produce a text that helps today’s trace organic analyst understand and overcome the difficulties of sample preparation by learning how to THINK GREEN.