Shaping Effective Practices for Incorporating Sustainability Assessment in Manuscripts Submitted to ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering: Catalysis and Catalytic Processes

The principles of green chemistry and green engineering provide guidelines for choosing reagents, catalysts, and operating conditions aimed at minimizing adverse effects of catalysts and catalytic processes on human health and the environment. The use of these qualitative principles in assessing the sustainability of catalysts and catalytic process concepts remains valuable. However, the editors of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering (ACS SCE) expect greater implementation of sustainability metrics to quantify the extent to which the adverse effects of incumbent catalytic technologies are mitigated by the innovations described in manuscripts submitted to the journal. Authors are strongly encouraged to adopt these quantitative analyses not only to identify and quantify the contributions to sustainability of innovations reported in manuscripts but to also reveal economic and environmental problem areas that must still be addressed in future research to achieve a sustainable process.(1) The outcomes of such analyses also inform investments in research that will eventually lead to the commercialization of green chemical technologies. This editorial suggests guidelines for incorporating quantitative sustainability assessments in manuscripts describing catalytic processes. We have classified the guidelines based on the types of manuscripts we receive in the area of catalysis. Please note that guidelines for electrocatalysis will be provided in a separate editorial on sustainability metrics for electrochemical processes and will appear later this year.