Miniaturization as a smart strategy to achieve greener sample preparation approaches: A view through greenness assessment

Green Analytical Chemistry has been a cornerstone in every stage of method development, including sample preparation. In this sense, extraction techniques have evolved from conventional ones to a wide variety of miniaturized extraction techniques. This new generation of approaches has been developed not only to improve the analytical performance but also the safety for the operator and the environment. To evaluate the impact and sustainability of a method, several green metric tools have been described. In the first part of this review, some of these green metric tools were summarized to highlight their advantages and disadvantages. Then, AGREEprep was selected as the most suitable tool to evaluate several published methods for diverse applications in prominent fields in Analytical Chemistry. The influence of miniaturization of sample preparation strategies was discussed in terms of the use of less and safer solvents, reduced waste generation and energy consumption, and enhanced portability and throughput.