Ionic Liquids: Solvents for sustainable chemistry.
Tom Welton
Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, U.K.
Since their introduction there has been an increasing interest in the use of ionic liquids for chemicals production. Much of the justification of this has been that they are ‘Green Solvents’. This has been challenged on several occasions. However, any process solvent should be judged in terms of the overall environmental impact of the process that it is a part of. There is no such thing as an intrinsically Green Solvent.
We are really interested in creating a more sustainable chemicals industry and a big part of this is the introduction of more sustainable processes. In this ionic liquids have already achieved important successes and more will follow.
We discuss the performance of ionic liquids against different environmental criteria. We demonstrate ionic liquid applications that are more sustainable than the processes that they replaced. We describe the potential for ionic liquids to provide sustainable processes in future industrial applications.