Hydrogen Peroxide: A Key Chemical for Today's Sustainable Development

The global utilization of hydrogen peroxide, a green oxidant that decomposes in water and oxygen, has gone from 0.5 million tonnes per year three decades ago to 4.5 million tonnes per year in 2014, and is still climbing. With the aim of expanding the utilization of this eminent green chemical across different industrial and civil sectors, the production and use of hydrogen peroxide as a green industrial oxidant is reviewed herein to provide an overview of the explosive growth of its industrial use over the last three decades and of the state of the art in its industrial manufacture, with important details of what determines the viability of the direct production from oxygen and hydrogen compared with the traditional auto-oxidation process.