Centrifugal Partition Chromatography: The Key to Green Preparative Chromatography

Chemists are looking for “green” methods that can reduce the impact of their work on the environment, particularly from the hazardous materials they use. A primary target of this effort is liquid chromatography, for which commercial laboratories use large quantities of toxic solvents.

Chromatography involves several steps that incorporate hazardous chemicals, but the stage that scientists consider to be the most environmentally hazardous is chromatographic separation. A single high-performance analytical liquid chromatograph operating at a flow rate of 1 mL/min, for instance, can use up to 500 liters of solvent per year for separation.¹Preparative chromatography typically operates at 100 mL/min, and, scaled up to the size of an average commercial preparative chromatography laboratory, this can translate to tens of thousands of liters of toxic chemicals.^1,2.