The volatile organic solvents are important chemicals and widely used, with applications as reaction media in synthetic chemistry, in liquid–liquid extractions and in the coating industry where rapid removal by evaporation is necessary. Recent estimates suggest that solvents account for the majority of the waste produced by the chemical industry. In the other hand, in the atmosphere, such volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are species still of great importance for a wide range of geophysical and environmental problems varying from local issues to global scale. Two of them are related to the fact that these volatile organic compounds are key ingredients in the formation of ozone and secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) in polluted air, both species playing a significant role in determining regional air quality. Moreover, some of the volatile organic compounds emitted in the atmosphere are toxic and can have harmful effects on human health and the environment, with solvent emissions that contribute to poor air quality, and causing of about 700 000 premature deaths annually in the EU. However, such volatile organic solvents have been targeted for replacement with safer, non-volatile, and ideally renewable alternatives in many recent reviews and solvent guides but this has proven to be difficult. Environmental sustainability is at the forefront of modern research efforts. Thus, a number of alternatives to classically volatile organic solvents have been recently proposed but many have issues of their own specificity. Of these, special attention is related to four volatile organic compounds namely para-cymene, 2,2,5,5-tetramethyloxolane (TMO), methyl pivalate and pinacolone. All these four volatile organic compounds have been proposed as very good candidates to replace the classic toxic solvents. The para-cymene, methyl pivalate and pinacolone are suitable candidates that are proposed to replace the excessive use of n-hexane while TMO is used to replace aromatics such as toluene. By contrast, with classically volatile organic solvents little is known of the air quality impacts of new clean solvents. Thus, despite the fact that all four compounds listed above and selected to be studied in the ATMO-SOS project are not quite new compounds in terms of their presence in the atmosphere, data on their atmospheric behavior are almost unknown. For example, the para-cymene is released from motor vehicle exhaust, solvent evaporation, and industrial wastewater, but it can be formed as well in situ by the conversion of some biogenic hydrocarbons (such as α-pinene) via atmospheric reactions. Even though para-cymene has been identified as a volatile organic compound in the atmosphere unfortunately in the literature information on the atmospheric behavior of this compound is very poor. To our knowledge in the literature are only fewer studies that show the reactivity of this compound towards the OH and NO₃ radicals. For gas-phase TMO, the only literature data concerns an UV absorption spectrum, while for methyl pivalate and pinacolone no information about atmospheric behavior exists.