Sustainable chemical technology: Core concepts, key subfields, and assessment approaches

Sustainable Chemical Technology provides an integrative framework for designing and deploying chemical products and manufacturing routes that reduce life-cycle environmental burdens while maintaining technical performance and economic viability. While green chemistry principles guide safer and more efficient transformations at the molecular level, sustainability outcomes at scale are often dominated by process and system factors, including separations and solvent management, utilities and energy integration, operability, and supply-chain constraints. This Short Communication proposes a concise working definition and a four-level interpretation structure spanning material, process, system, and life-cycle perspectives to support consistent boundary setting and comparison across technologies. Building on this framing, we summarize a compact taxonomy of core subfields feedstock and resources, reaction and process design, solvents and separations, and circularity and waste and outline typical intervention levers and trade-offs within each. Finally, we recommend a minimal assessment bundle that combines fast screening metrics with life-cycle thinking to reduce burden shifting and enable transparent decision-making from early research to industrial adoption.