Can we replace liquid chromatography with the greener capillary electrophoresis?

Liquid phase separations are major players in chemical analysis. Liquid chromatography (LC) uses mobile phases that typically contain organic solvents. LC could generate significant volumes of chemical waste especially in routine analysis where many samples are processed. An alternative to LC is capillary electrophoresis (CE) which uses smaller volumes of background solution/mobile phase. In this review, we compared the analytical performance of different modes of LC and CE for the analysis of the same compounds. The modes selected were reversed phase LC versus capillary zone electrophoresis and electrokinetic chromatography, chiral LC versus chiral electrokinetic chromatography, and size exclusion chromatography versus capillary gel electrophoresis. Articles covered were published from 2018 to 2020. We will recommend if CE can replace LC for some applications.