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It is more than 7 years since I wrote my opening article for the first issue of Green Chemistry—“Green chemistry: challenges and opportunities”. In this update article I will present a personal view of how the area has changed—mostly for the better—and what we need to do now. I will consider how the key drivers for major changes in the way that we practise chemistry have strengthened, how the range of relevant research has broadened, how the case studies from industry have increased and, perhaps most importantly, how our appreciation of what green chemistry should mean has matured. I will also be looking ahead at the immediate and longer-term challenges and opportunities as I now see them—in research and in industrial application and also in education and promotion.
James H. Clark (2005) studied this question.