Ecological assessment as balancing act between disruptive innovation and industrial implementation: Designer-solvent processes with automatic product purification and recycling

In the pharmaceutical industry is genres large amounts of waste due to the multiple and complex purification steps needed. This was problem has urged the need for sustainable production pathways in the pharmaceutical industry. In this paper the use of ionic liquids to conduct automated purification is assessed by means of a Life Cycle Assessment. Ionic liquids are regarded as green solvents due to their low vapor pressure and low emission of volatile organic compounds, unlike common organic solvents. They have unique properties that can aid in the separation and recycle steps, which can minimize the need for a complex purification process and have many environmental benefits. Their use can lower the environmental impact; however, they shift the impact towards the early stages. Therefore, its use and implementation in a process need to be carefully evaluated. Two scenarios of ionic liquid-aid separation are developed to assess the environmental impact and identify hot sports before the experimental stages. These scenarios are benchmarked against a batch process and solvent-less process. It was found the impacts for both scenarios were 10-50-fold larger, with respect to the benchmark cases. The scenarios where then optimized to have 100 % automated phase separation and reduce the purification needed. Based on the solubility properties of the ionic liquids it is possible to obtain an automated separation by forming multiphase systems. This optimization showed that under these conditions it is possible to obtain comparable systems with benchmark technologies, and it is possible that further optimization can lead to better process compared to the benchmark cases. It was also found that to maintain a low environmental impact recyclability of the ionic liquid and high concentrated systems are necessary