(691a) Estimating True Cost of Ionic Liquids Using Monetization

Due to the attractive properties of ionic liquids, they have found their way into many applications where they showed high potential in replacing existing chemicals and systems. However, rising concerns over their ecological impacts, e.g. toxicity and biodegradability, and high cost have limited their use. To address this issue, researchers have started to adopt the life cycle thinking for the design of greener and less expensive ionic liquids. However, having multiple metrics like cost and environmental impacts to compare the sustainability of ionic liquids can be challenging for decision making. This is especially true when different weighting factors can lead to different results in a multi-objective optimization problem. In this work, we apply monetization to estimate the true cost of ionic liquids by converting environmental units into a single monetary unit. Our results show that the monetized cost can be higher than or as high as the production cost. In this work, we also investigate the impact of atom economy, size of molecule and cation group on the monetized cost and its environmental contributions. We show how two ionic liquids of different atom economy can have the same cost of production but different monetized costs. We expect this to be a starting point for future studies targeting the design of more sustainable ionic liquids. For example, the impact of the different synthesis procedures of ionic liquids on both the cost and environmental impacts can be investigated. Also, how different anions and cation families affect the sustainability of other ionic liquids qualitatively and quantitavely is a question that need to be answered.