Future Trends for Creen Chemistry in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Future Trends for Creen Chemistry in the Pharmaceutical Industry 

Peter J. Dunn, Andrew S. Wells, and Michael T. Williams 

The publicahon in 1992 [1] of a table comparing the E factors of various industry segments raised awareness of the high levels of waste generahon in the pharmaceuhcal industry. Initial efforts to explain this state of affairs highhghted  

However, there was a reahzahon that the various industry segments were actually in the order that would be expected, that is, the pharmaceuhcal industry in general should produce more waste per kilo than the fine chemical industry, which in turn should produce more waste than the bulk chemical industry because of issues of molecular complexity and synthesis length. The target for each industry segment should be to improve and, ideally, move up to the next level (see Table 16.1) [2]. 

It is intereshng that 12 of the previous 15 chapter authors in this book have menhoned the E factor, which shows how embedded the concept has become in the pharmaceutical industry. Eurthermore, in 2007 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) became the first company to set E factor goals (or its equivalent, mass productivity ) across its phase-three development compounds and to pubhsh those goals on 

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