Designing sustainable catalysts that matter: A process-level framework

Catalysis remains central to chemical manufacturing and will stay essential as processes face tighter sustainability, energy, and resource constraints. Although catalysis is listed as a core principle of green chemistry because it can reduce material and energy intensity, most sustainability assessments still stop at the reaction level. Catalysts and the processes that use them are treated as separate rather than integrated systems. This paper takes a process-oriented view. We examine lifetime, stability under real feeds, regenerability, energy demand of the overall process, metal sourcing, manufacturability, and end-of-life management as co-equal determinants of whether a catalyst is sustainable. Industrial cases and literature show that optimizing isolated metrics such as initial activity or peak selectivity is often insufficient. We therefore outline a set of Catalyst Process Design Principles intended to push development toward lifecycle-aware, scalable, and industrially relevant outcomes.