this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Look, I'm all for green chemistry, and I'll switch to using safer, more environmentally friendly reagents and solvents the second they are close to the efficacy of the real deal.
Until then, leave my acetone and heavy-metal catalysts alone!
Acetone is rather green (7 in GSK solvent guide), but I for one haven't used heavy metal catalysts in a year, and more if you don't count palladium
Depends what is meant by green. Acetone is decent for health and safety (flammability notwithstanding) but is produced from petrochemicals and tied to the production of phenol (petroleum -> benzene and propane (or natural gas -> propane), propane -> propylene, benzene + propylene -> cumene, cumene + O2 -> phenol + acetone). Not much chlorophyll involved. Also has somewhere between a moderate to obscene CO2 burden depending on how you draw that box in and around the oil industry, but so do most commodity chemicals.
Maybe not directly, but a lot of commodity chemicals rely on some truly vile metal mixtures for catalysis :)
Almost all of solvents are made from petrochemicals, so it's a distinction without difference. Few exceptions (bioethanol, MeTHF, DMSO maybe) also require obscene amounts of energy to prepare
What makes acetone tick as a solvent is the fact that most of phenol is used up immediately for bisphenol A, and this leaves 1eq of acetone from cumene process unused (or cyclohexanone, and this leaves all acetone unused). In some way, acetone is a waste product and that's why PMMA or isophorone diamine is a thing
Just it's low toxicity, the fact it's non-chlorinated and sane boiling point makes acetone a pretty green solvent by comparison