Greenness assessment of 174 CEN, ISO, and pharmacopoeia standard methods and their sub-methods used for environmental, food, trace element and pharmaceutical analyses

Abstract

This work evaluates the greenness of 174 standard methods with a sample preparation step and their 332 sub-method variations from CEN, ISO, and Pharmacopoeias, used in laboratories for environmental/organic, food, trace element, or pharmaceutical analyses. The widely adopted AGREEprep metric was applied to assess the greenness of the standard methods. The discussion begins with the overall scores of each method, followed by a detailed analysis of individual criteria, that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the evaluated sample preparation methods in terms of greenness.

The results revealed a generally poor greenness performance, as 67 % of the methods scored below 0.2 on the AGREEprep scale, where 1 represents the highest possible score. Specifically, the percentage of methods scoring below 0.2 was 86 % for methods related to the environmental analysis of organic compounds, 62 % for methods used in food analysis, 62 % for those applied to inorganic and trace metals analysis, and 45 % for methods used in pharmaceutical analysis. The findings obtained in this work reveal that many official methods still rely on resource-intensive, outdated techniques, scoring poorly on key greenness criteria. This discrepancy highlights the urgent need to update standard methods by including contemporary and mature sample preparation methods, as the traditional methodologies currently used often conflict with global sustainability efforts and increase regulatory and societal pressures. As such, this contribution serves not only as a critique of the current state of official standard methods but also as a call to action for their reform. This work was conducted within the framework of the IUPAC project "Greenness of official standard sample preparation methods" (2021-015-2-500).