Assessing the environmental and overall performance of gas chromatographic analyses. Development of a comprehensive evaluation framework and application to routine chiral analyses of fragrances as a case study

Enantioselective gas chromatography is used in fragrance quality control laboratories to authenticate the origin of raw materials and detect possible frauds or adulterations of perfumes. These laboratories must contend with increasing attention to environmental sustainability, quality standards that require accurate and reliable measurements, and practical considerations such as productivity, costs, and simplicity of methods. Quantitative tools enabling a global evaluation of all these aspects are therefore required. In the first part of the study, a GC-MS method for the chiral recognition of a set of odorants was developed and speeded up. The improvement in environmental footprint associated with fast GC was then quantitatively evaluated using AGREE. This tool allowed a rapid comparison of environmental impacts between different analytical methods, but, despite a very different energy consumption, showed few differences in the final score of the developed methods. Therefore, a multi-criteria approach based on the RGB model, for the first time specifically dedicated to GC analytical methods, was developed. It accurately accounts for the contribution of GC and the need to limit the consumption of energy and toxic solvents while maintaining analytical performance and adequate laboratory productivity. The template can be adapted to analyses with a different scope by changing the analytical performance criteria and the reference threshold of the method. The global assessment of the methods developed showed that fast GC improves the greenness and the productivity of a laboratory, and lowers costs while maintaining adequate analytical performance making the approach not only green but also sustainable.