This book was written by a group of experts on various subjects of solvents’ use, the fundamental principles governing their application, effect on health and environment, residual solvents in products, their concentration in industrial environments, current regulations, safer substitutes, non-emitting technologies of use, contamination cleanup, personal protection, and the most modern trends in future technology. The authors, who are the members of prestigious universities and industries from around the world, altogether have previously written 47 books and hundreds of papers on the subject and here they give a synthesis of their experiences and opinions on how best to change the global use of solvents in order to obtain benefits of technology and at the same time limit risk and health effects, and more.

All 25 chapters of this book were written between summer of 1999 and spring of 2000 and contain over 5000 references to source literature, enabling the user to find specific information on any subject related to solvents. The text is illustrated by figures and tables which compare in number with multi-volume encyclopedias.

The book contains a synthesis of a large sample of data and information to reveal fundamental principles which data helped to discover. The actual data on 1141 solvents are in the form of a searchable database on CD-ROM (see separate information on Database of Solvents, ISBN 1985198259). The database contains 110 categories of data (fields) and almost 40,000 single data entries, making it the largest extant database on solvents.