Atom economy is a useful concept and metric that can help inform sustainability-related discussions of chemical transformations.  Applied at the stoichiometric level, it provides fundamental information about the inherent mass efficiency of a given reaction.  As a novel concept published by Trost in 1991, atom economy has helped chemists think about their synthetic routes in a way that seeks to incorporate all of the reactants into the desired product, so that reactions are designed to be inherently mass efficient.<br/><br/>Over the last few decades, it can be argued that the conversation on chemical reaction mass efficiency has expanded from atom economy to the circular economy, and the perspective expanded from the molecular level to the level of the global economy.  In industrial processes, consideration of recycle loops and by-product utilization are important, and each can help reduce the environmental impact of a chemical process.  Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and life cycle thinking help to better understand the impact of a chemical process across the life cycle of the intended products.  And recently, there has been tremendous focus on helping society move from a linear economy to a circular economy, where materials are maintained in their most valuable states for maximum time, and ultimately converted back into useful materials at end of life.<br/><br/>In this talk, we will share perspective on the Atom Economy principle, and discuss the nano to macro thinking that is applied today when evaluating chemical transformations and chemical products.  We will provide examples of how the concepts of LCA, waste utilization, and circular economy can help to assess the sustainability attributes of chemical technology.  Taken together with atom economy, these concepts can help us better understand where a given reaction, process, and technology fits within a sustainable society.

Principle 2. From atom economy to circular economy

255th National Meeting (2018)

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