Advances in Green Analytical Chemistry for Pharmaceuticals

Green Analytical Chemistry (GAC) has emerged as a transformative approach that integrates the principles of green chemistry into analytical method development to reduce environmental impact, enhance safety, and improve sustainability. This review highlights major advancements in environmentally friendly analytical practices, focusing on greener sample preparation techniques such as SPE, SPME, SBSE, MAE, UAE, SFE, and DLLME, all of which significantly reduce solvent consumption, waste generation, and analysis time. Progressive solvent innovations including natural deep eutectic solvents, liquefied gases, supercritical fluids, and ethanol-based systems offer safer alternatives to traditional hazardous organic solvents. Developments in chromatographic techniques, including superheated water chromatography, supercritical fluid chromatography, high–water-content LC systems, miniaturized LC formats, and AQbD-driven green HPLC methods, demonstrate strong potential to replace or minimize the use of toxic solvents while maintaining high analytical performance. Advancements in green instrumentation and ionization technologies such as low-thermal-mass GC, MAI, SAI, and integrated multi-ionization MS platforms further reduce energy consumption, reagent use, and waste. Overall, the evolution of GAC underscores a crucial shift toward analytical methods that are not only accurate and robust but also safer, cleaner, and aligned with global sustainability goals, making it a key pillar of future pharmaceutical and environmental analysis.