ADVANCES IN GREEN CHEMISTRY FOR SUSTAINABLE INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW

Abstract

Green chemistry has evolved from a pollution-prevention concept into a design framework for reducing hazards, resource consumption, waste generation, and energy demand across the life cycle of chemical products and processes. This comprehensive review examines recent advances in green chemistry and their relevance to sustainable industrial applications, with emphasis on catalysis, renewable and waste-derived feedstocks, green solvents, biocatalysis, biomass valorization, flow chemistry, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, process intensification, circular manufacturing, and digital approaches. The review first summarizes the twelve principles of green chemistry and explains how they differ from approaches that merely treat pollution after it has been generated. It then considers how these principles are translated into industrial practice through safer reaction design, high atom economy, selective catalysis, solvent substitution, renewable carbon, energy-efficient processing, real-time monitoring, and design for degradation. Particular attention is given to biorefineries and biomass-derived chemicals, where catalytic and chemoenzymatic conversion can connect waste streams with higher-value products. Industrial examples and enabling technologies in pharmaceuticals, polymers, fuels, food and agrochemicals, water treatment, and advanced materials are discussed. Green solvents such as water, bio-based solvents, ionic liquids, deep eutectic solvents, and supercritical fluids are compared in terms of opportunities and limitations rather than being assumed to be universally benign. The review also emphasizes that a process should not be described as sustainable solely because it uses a renewable feedstock or a biological catalyst; life-cycle assessment, process mass intensity, E-factor, energy demand, toxicity, catalyst criticality, recyclability, and economic feasibility should be evaluated together. Emerging directions include continuous manufacturing, earth-abundant catalysis, electrochemical and photochemical synthesis, artificial intelligence-assisted reaction optimization, and integrated circular biorefineries. Major barriers remain, including scale-up, feedstock variability, catalyst stability, solvent recovery, infrastructure requirements, data gaps, regulatory constraints, and the potential for burden shifting between environmental categories. Future industrial green chemistry will therefore depend on systems-level design that combines molecular-level hazard prevention with process engineering, circularity, digital monitoring, and credible sustainability assessment.