Advancing cleaner chemical engineering practices in nicotine extraction through supercritical CO2 technology

The growing demand for nicotine-based products requires extraction processes that are not only efficient but also aligned with cleaner chemical engineering principles, including reduced solvent toxicity, improved process safety, and industrial scalability. However, most existing studies focus on laboratory-scale optimization and rarely integrate process selection with economic feasibility and cleaner production criteria. In this work, alternative nicotine extraction technologies are systematically evaluated using a hybrid fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making framework that incorporates technical performance, environmental impact, safety, and economic considerations under uncertainty. The results identify supercritical CO 2 extraction as the most suitable process, outperforming conventional and assisted extraction methods in terms of product quality, operational efficiency, emission reduction, and occupational safety. The selected process is experimentally validated through nicotine extraction from tobacco leaves, with performance quantified using three-stage high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). To assess industrial relevance, a techno-economic evaluation based on cost–benefit analysis is conducted, indicating economic feasibility under the base-case regional assumptions, with positive net present value, a benefit–cost ratio greater than unity, an attractive internal rate of return, and a monthly profitability range of $8500–$16,652. Robustness checks based on criterion-weight perturbation and WASPAS aggregation-parameter variation confirmed that the first-ranked alternative remained stable across plausible uncertainty scenarios. The originality of the work lies in the domain-specific integration of fuzzy MCDM-based technology ranking, experimental SC-CO 2 feasibility validation, and regional cost–benefit assessment for cleaner nicotine extraction, rather than in proposing a new MCDM algorithm. Overall, this study provides a scalable decision-support framework that links technology ranking, laboratory validation, and economic screening for cleaner nicotine extraction.