Plug and play: Personalised solvent selection for safe and sustainable chemistry

Posted on Tuesday 13 October 2026

Solvents are used in large quantities in many manufacturing processes, which creates waste, pollution, and presents health and safety risks. To steer solvent use towards safer options, solvent selection guides have become important tools in modern organic synthetic chemistry.

However, existing guides generally apply one-size-fits-all hazard rankings that do not necessarily reflect the actual risk in the user's process. To address this, Dr James Sherwood, a Post Doctoral Researcher in the Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence, in collaboration with Professor Avatr Matharu, has embedded the European Commission's Safe and Sustainable by Design framework into an open-access, interactive solvent selection guide covering 365 solvents: https://github.com/jamesrsherwood/SSG

This new guide moves beyond hazard, to quantify health risk using occupational exposure models and risk characterisation ratios, while also estimating climate change impact, freshwater use, and predicted reaction conversion. Users can therefore simultaneously optimise safety, environmental impact, and efficiency in a single, bespoke tool.

Matharu adds, “Promoting sustainability and green impact, future work could extend the guide by incorporating absolute environmental sustainability and social life-cycle assessment indicators, estimates of environmental exposure and consumer exposure for commercial products.”

A major focus of the Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence is the consideration of solvent use, and possible replacements, in order to make chemistry safer and more sustainable.