It highlights the waste produced in the process as opposed to the reaction, thus helping those who try to fulfil one of the twelve principles of green chemistry to avoid waste production. E-factors ignore recyclable factors such as recycled solvents and re-used catalysts, which obviously increases the accuracy but ignores the energy involved in the recovery (these are often included theoretically by assuming 90% solvent recovery). The main difficulty with E-factors is the need to define system boundaries, for example, which stages of the production or product life-cycle to consider before calculations can be made.