Living with our machines: Towards a more sustainable future

With illustrative examples from our laboratories, we make the case for how our digital and machine-based world is impacting on the assembly of our functional molecules in a more sustainable fashion. Our equipment today is better able to deliver efficiencies through labour-saving methods, optimisation and scale-up, helping to minimise solvent usage, improve reaction telescoping and enhance other principles for process intensification. The machinery gives us confidence in safely handling reactive gases, exotherms and the other potentially hazardous events through remote control methods. Continuous flow chemistry processing plays a central role in delivering on this new holistic systems approach to synthesis.