Determination of the global material economy (GME) of synthesis sequences—a green chemistry metric to evaluate the greenness of products

Evaluating the greenness of a product is a social, economical and scientific challenge in chemistry. Green metrics in terms of mass can be determined from the characteristics of all the reactions involved in the total synthesis of the product. In this work we propose a new paradigm to determine the global material economy of the whole sequence. We have demonstrated that this key metric is directly proportional to the global atom economy of the corresponding total synthesis. The mathematical algorithm to calculate the global material economy can be applied to any process, whatever the number of the points of convergence in the synthesis, allowing the determination, in terms of mass, of the greenness of a product with respect to all the starting materials involved in the total synthesis.