Searching for green solvents

Academic research in the area of green solvents is focused on neither the industries that use solvents most nor the types of solvents that the research community believes have the best hope of reducing solvent-related environmental damage. Those of us who are primarily motivated by a desire to reduce such damage would do well to look at the major uses of solvents, to determine the problems that currently make those applications less-than-green and focus our research efforts on potential solutions to those problems. As a contribution to such efforts, I present four grand challenges in the field of green solvents: finding a sufficient range of green solvents, recognizing whether a solvent is actually green, finding an easily-removable polar aprotic solvent and eliminating distillation.