Issue 12 of Green Chemistry now published online

21 Nov 2012

The last issue of 2012 of Green Chemistry is now published online.

The front cover of this months’ issue features work by Amit Naskar and colleagues from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, who report the development of lignin-based thermoplastics. Lignin is one of the most abundant natural polymers, and represents an valuable renewable resource. Previous work into applications of this material found that it could be combined with flexible polymers to produce a variety of co-polymer materials. However, these materials tended to be thermoset plastics and brittle materials and therefore are barely recyclable. Here the team managed to create lignin-based co-polymer thermoplastics, which would be recyclable and potentially biodegradable as well.

Turning renewable resources into value-added polymer: development of lignin-based thermoplastic, Tomonori Saito, Rebecca H. Brown, Marcus A. Hunt, Deanna L. Pickel, Joseph M. Pickel, Jamie M. Messman, Frederick S. Baker, Martin Keller and Amit K. Naskar, Green Chem., 2012, 14, 3295-3303

The inside front cover highlights work by Yu Fan, Xiaojun Bao and colleagues from the China University of Petroleum (China) and the University of British Columbia (Canada) who report the synthesis of zeolite Y from natural aluminosilicate minerals for application in fluid catalytic cracking. Modern industrial synthesis of zeolite Y involves chemicals that are derived from natural bauxite, but this requires an huge amount of energy and generates a lot of waste. Here, zeolite Y could be synthesised directly from natural aluminosilicate minerals, avoiding the need of additional inorganic chemicals and relying instead on natural raw materials. The resulting zeolite exhibited outstanding catalytic cracking performance.