Climate & Environment
Process Mass Intensity (PMI)
The total mass of materials used to produce one kilogram of product — the pharmaceutical industry's standard resource-efficiency metric.
Definition
Process mass intensity is the ratio of the total mass of all materials used in a process — reactants, solvents, reagents, process water — to the mass of the final product. Developed within green chemistry as a practical alternative to atom economy, it captures real process inefficiency; pharmaceutical processes can show PMI values in the hundreds, meaning hundreds of kilograms of input per kilogram of active ingredient.
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