Green Engineering in Pharmaceuticals

The overall goal of this project is to investigate the green engineering issues concerning pharmaceutical industries today. The pharmaceutical industry produces a large amount of waste per amount of useful product, much of which is contaminated solvents. If it is possible to recover solvents and reuse them; not only does the solvent not go to waste but it can be placed back into the process. The issues are being uncovered and analyzed through cooperative efforts with a pharmaceutical partner and supported by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ? Region 2. Solvent, energy, and waste reduction/replacement solutions are being developed to improve the process of a typical drug by instituting a pervaporation system. In addition, a solvent selection table was updated to include over 50 solvents for the purpose of allowing a user to compare the greenness between two different process routes. The comparison was made possible by the creation of a pharmaceutical index which ranks the greenness of one solvent or process route compared to another. A given process or solvent receives an index ranking 0 ? 10 based on a variety of environmental and health parameters important in the pharmaceutical industry.