this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Science Memes

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Flowchart for STEM (mander.xyz)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

I for one haven't used heavy metal catalysts in a year

Maybe not directly, but a lot of commodity chemicals rely on some truly vile metal mixtures for catalysis :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

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