Handbook of Green Analytical Chemistry

Book Preface

Now it is time to move from the general principles to the practice. The efforts made by the analytical chemistry and chemistry community opinion during the 2011 International Year of the Chemistry have been focused on demonstrating to the public that our discipline is not the reason for the environmental damage and the health problems that have emerged from our developed societies. On the contrary, chemistry is one of the main reasons to extend the human life and to improve its quality level and the best tool to solve the environmental problems created in the past by uncorrect use of the available technologies. So, it is a happy coincidence that in recent months the first books especially devoted to Green Analytical Chemistry have been published and also that important journals like Trends in Analytical Chemistry have devoted special issues to the topic of Green Analytical Chemistry.

The handbook, which the reader has in hand, is an attempt to advance the ethics and practical objectives of Green Analytical Chemistry. The book has been possible due to the invitation of Wiley-Blackwell editors but also because of the critical mass of research teams who have contributed to establish a series of methodological and technological tools to prevent and reduce the deleterious effects of our analytical activities.

As a main difference to previously published texts, the readers will find in this book a deep and complete perspective of the Green Analytical Chemistry as a matter of facts guided by the most fundamental principles and also a catalogue of tools for greening the work on chemical analysis.

The structure of the text covers a fundamental part, a series of proposals for greening the different steps of the analytical process and some final chapters focused on different fields of applications.

In the fundamental part, the main idea has been to move from historical and theoretical considerations to proposals for authors, editors, and users of the analytical laboratories to move from the old practices, which take into consideration only the method figures of merit, to a new frame in which the side environmental and operator risk effects could pay an important role. However, the most important part of the handbook is the series of detailed chapters, written by specialists in each field, which have made a literature survey on efforts to avoid reagent consumption and waste generation and can provide to the reader many practical tools to do
environmentally friendly analytical tasks and to take advantage of the economical opportunities that are offered by Green Analytical Chemistry.

In the different application fields considered in this text, the reader will identify that Green Analytical Chemistry can operate in all contexts; from the industrial to the sanitary and not only in environmental applications, thus contributing once again, to move from the theory to the practice.

For the aforementioned reasons, editors and authors are convinced of the necessity of this book and the fact that a prestigious analytical journal like Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry is preparing a special issue on Green Analytical Methods for 2012 confirms that this is a good opportunity to incorporate to our everyday work the main ideas and tools of Green Analytical Chemistry and to do it, we hope that this handbook will be the reference book.