Green Chemistry Blog

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.

Synthesis of zeolite Y from natural aluminosilicate minerals for fluid catalytic cracking application, Tiesen Li, Haiyan Liu, Yu Fan, Pei Yuan, Gang Shi, Xiaotao T. Bi and Xiaojun Bao, Green Chem., 2012, 14, 3255-3259

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The latest issue of Green Chemistry is now available to read online!

The front cover of issue 11 of Green Chemistry features work my Pedro Lozano and colleagues from the University of Murcia, Spain, who report a clean bio-catalytic route to flavour esters.  The team used switchable ionic liquid/solid phases as the reaction/separation media to achieve this, whereby a fully homogeneous liquid phase could be achieved at 50 °C and a solid-phase system could be created at room temperature.  This allows the enzyme to function in the ionic liquid at temperatures compatible for enzyme catalysis, in this case giving almost 100% yields of flavour esters at 50 °C.  By cooling and subsequent centrifugation, the liquid, almost pure, reaction product could be easily separated off leaving the biocatalyst/ionic liquid system in place which can then be reused for multiple cycles.

A clean enzymatic process for producing flavour esters by direct esterification in switchable ionic liquid/solid phases, Pedro Lozano,  Juana M. Bernal and Alicia Navarro, Green Chem., 2012, 14, 3026-3033

The inside front cover of the issue features work by Joshua Taygerly, Emily Peterson and colleagues from Amgen Inc. and Northeastern University, USA, who have developed a guide which aims to help synthetic chemists find suitable and more environmentally friendly alternatives to a DCM-solvent system for chromatographic purification of compounds.  The authors selected several ‘drug-like’ molecules which reflected the types of molecules regularly prepared and purified, tested several alternative solvent systems to DCM.  From the results, they assembled a figure which allows the scientist to find the potentially equivalent, alternative system(s).  The primary use of this guide is to provide chemists with a quickly identifiable starting point for selecting alternative solvent systems to DCM.

A convenient guide to help select replacement solvents for dichloromethane in chromatography, Joshua P. Taygerly, Larry M. Miller, Alicia Yee and Emily A. Peterson, Green Chem., 2012, 14, 3020-3025

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You can also read Pedro Lozano’s recent interview with Green Chemistry here.

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