About Green Chemical Engineering

Green Chemical Engineering

Green Chemical Engineering, abbreviated GreenChE, is an open-access scientific journal published by KeAi, with publishing services provided by Elsevier, in association with the Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Launched in 2020, it is devoted to a single organising idea: that chemistry and chemical engineering should be redesigned, at every stage from raw material to final product, to do less harm — using safer substances, less energy and fewer resources, and generating less waste. It publishes significant, cutting-edge research and the latest technological advances in the green and sustainable development of chemistry and chemical engineering, and in other relevant disciplines connected to them.

The journal carries the print ISSN 2096-9147 and the online ISSN 2666-9528, and it is indexed in EI and Scopus. Its copyright line names the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is both its institutional home and one of China's leading centres for exactly the kind of research the journal publishes — including internationally known work on ionic liquids and clean process engineering. GreenChE therefore began life not as a general chemistry title with a green section, but as the journal of a research community that already existed and needed an international platform of its own.

Why the journal was created

The founding rationale was set out in the journal's first issue in 2020 in an editorial by S. Zhang asking, in its title, why Green Chemical Engineering had been created. The editorial looked back to the 1990s, when the twelve principles of green chemistry were proposed, giving chemists a systematic way to consider the potential impacts of their work across its whole life cycle. It then described a framework developed from the whole process of chemical engineering — summarised as one core, three principles and nine strategies: one "green" core; three principles of nontoxicity, simplicity and harmony; and nine strategies for the full life cycle, running from raw material through medium to product, so that product preparation, pollution control and the ecological cycle are integrated rather than treated separately.

That framework explains the journal's mission as its founder stated it: to lead the development of green chemical science and technology by building a platform for exchanging new ideas and promoting interdisciplinary innovation, publicising representative and cutting-edge achievements, and helping to define what "green chemical engineering" means as a discipline. In other words, GreenChE was founded partly as a research journal and partly as an act of definition — an attempt to give a young field a shared vocabulary, a shared standard of significance, and a place where its best work could be recognised as belonging together.

Aims and scope

The journal's stated aim is to publish work of exceptional significance to its own field that will also interest readers working in other areas of green chemical engineering. Its scope is organised around a set of named topic areas. They are: green solvents; reaction engineering; separation engineering; green alternative and functional materials; biochemistry and bioengineering; simulations, integration, safety and assessment; and recycling, environmental engineering and eco-industry. Submissions on other green chemical engineering topics are also considered, but those seven headings are the clearest map of what the editors expect to publish.

Each heading corresponds to a real pressure point in the chemical industry. Solvents are used in enormous quantities and are a major source of emissions and exposure, so finding greener ones — or designing processes that need less solvent — has outsized effects. Reaction engineering determines how efficiently raw materials become products rather than by-products. Separation engineering is often where most of a process's energy is actually consumed, in distillation, extraction and purification. A journal that puts those three subjects at its centre is aiming at the places where greener engineering saves the most, rather than at cosmetic improvements.

Green solvents and ionic liquids

Green solvents deserve particular attention in any account of this journal, because they connect its scope directly to the strengths of its home institute. The Institute of Process Engineering in Beijing is closely associated with research on ionic liquids — salts that are liquid at or near room temperature, whose acidity, basicity and solvating behaviour can be designed by choosing their component ions. Ionic liquids have been studied as media for reactions and separations, including the capture of carbon dioxide and the recovery of valuable substances such as ammonia, precisely because a designer solvent can, in principle, replace a more volatile or more hazardous conventional one.

Work of this kind appears in the journal's pages in concrete form: studies combining machine-learning models with molecular descriptors to predict, for example, the solubility of ammonia in ionic liquids, so that a separation process can be designed around a solvent chosen by computation rather than by trial and error. That example captures the journal's characteristic blend — a green medium, a separation problem, and a simulation method, all in one paper — and shows why its editors treat green solvents, separation engineering and simulation as parts of a single subject rather than three separate ones.

Reactions, separations and sustainable catalysis

Alongside solvents, Green Chemical Engineering publishes research on sustainable catalysis and clean production processes, as its founding description emphasised. Catalysis is central to green engineering because a better catalyst can make a reaction run at lower temperature, with less waste and with cheaper or safer starting materials — improvements that multiply across every tonne of product a plant produces. The journal's literature includes, for instance, review work on the synthesis of cyclic carbonates by the cycloaddition of carbon dioxide with epoxides, a reaction that turns a greenhouse gas into a useful chemical building block and is a standard example of carbon dioxide being treated as a feedstock rather than only as an emission.

Reaction and separation engineering papers in the journal typically share a common test: does the work make a real process cleaner, safer or more efficient, and can that claim be supported with data? That engineering test distinguishes GreenChE from a pure chemistry journal. A new molecule is interesting here mainly insofar as it changes a process; a new process is interesting insofar as its material and energy balances, its safety and its life-cycle impacts can be shown to improve on what industry does now.

Carbon, recycling and the eco-industry

The journal was launched in 2020 with carbon-neutral chemical technology explicitly among its founding concerns, and its scope headings on recycling, environmental engineering and eco-industry give that concern a permanent home. Papers in this territory deal with turning waste streams into resources, recovering materials and energy from industrial processes, converting biomass and other renewable feedstocks, and designing industrial systems in which one plant's waste becomes another's input. The "harmony" principle in the founding framework — fitting chemical production into ecological cycles rather than against them — is the philosophical version of the same idea.

Simulations, integration, safety and assessment form the analytical backbone for all of this. Green claims in chemical engineering stand or fall on assessment: life-cycle analysis, process simulation and safety evaluation are how a supposedly greener route is checked against the possibility that it merely moves a burden from one stage, or one place, to another. By naming assessment as a core topic, the journal signals that it wants evidence, not slogans — a stance consistent with its demand that articles present findings of exceptional significance rather than incremental novelty.

Article types and peer review

Green Chemical Engineering considers several categories of contribution. Editorials, written on invitation from the editor-in-chief or from experts, introduce or comment on an issue's background and key contents and are limited to about 2,000 words. Reviews summarise and comment on recent progress and significant achievements in a specific field and propose future research directions; they may run to 15,000 words and carry an abstract of up to 250 words. Research articles report the latest results of innovative and important scientific significance, limited to 10,000 words, with an abstract of up to 250 words, up to five keywords and up to 60 references, with supporting information published online. Short communications provide a further, briefer route for urgent findings.

Submission is entirely online through the journal's homepage, and the journal operates a single-blind review process in which contributions are sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers, with the editor-in-chief responsible for the final decision on acceptance or rejection. Manuscripts are pre-checked by the editorial office before review. Published articles are open access; articles in the journal appear under Creative Commons licensing, as shown by the CC BY-NC-ND licence carried by its early published content. For authors, the practical meaning is a conventional, recognisable Elsevier-platform workflow attached to a young and highly focused title.

The Institute of Process Engineering and Beijing

The journal's Beijing base is not incidental. The Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is a national research institute whose work spans the science and engineering of processes — how materials and energy are transformed at scale — and it has built an international reputation in areas squarely inside GreenChE's scope, including ionic liquids and green process engineering. The journal's editorial office contact sits at the institute, and its founding editorial explicitly rested the new title on the institute's scientific strength and on the international cooperation platform provided by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

China's chemical industry is among the largest in the world, which gives a Chinese green chemical engineering journal a particular responsibility and a particular advantage. The environmental gains available from cleaner processes are largest where production is largest, and a journal edited from Beijing can see, at close range, both the scale of the problem and the speed at which new processes are actually deployed in industry. GreenChE's ambition, as stated at its founding, is global and interdisciplinary; its location keeps that ambition connected to the industrial reality it is trying to change.

Indexing, identity and place in the field

Green Chemical Engineering is indexed in EI and Scopus, and its articles are hosted on ScienceDirect, Elsevier's platform, which is where most readers will encounter it. Its bibliographic identity is compact: title Green Chemical Engineering, abbreviation Green Chem. Eng., print ISSN 2096-9147, online ISSN 2666-9528, publisher KeAi Communications with Elsevier publishing services, owner the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, first published in 2020, in English, from Beijing, China.

Within the wider literature, the journal sits between green chemistry — which concentrates on the design of safer chemicals and reactions — and mainstream chemical engineering, which concentrates on processes at scale. Its founding argument was that the meeting point needed a journal of its own, organised around the whole life cycle of chemical production. Six years of publication since 2020 have filled that frame with work on solvents, catalysts, separations, carbon dioxide use, recycling and assessment. For directory readers, GreenChE is best filed as exactly what its name says: the open-access journal of green chemical engineering, Chinese in base, international in authorship and ambition, and unusually explicit about the principles by which it judges whether engineering is truly green.