Issue: May / June 2022

The amount of waste has exponentially increased throughout the years and, with it, the presence of hazardous pollutants (heavy metals, halogenated organics etc.), that can potentially have adverse effects on humans and other living organisms. There is an unmet need for a more efficient and greener hazardous waste disposal as most of the conventional treatment processes and techniques fail to remove these hazard contaminants.

The following abstracts aim at highlighting the state-of-the-art technologies and approaches adopted to remove hazardous pollutants even at the trace concentrations. These abstracts include also a list of factors, such as technology lock-in and unfavourable regulations, that prevent the application of the so-called waste valorisation, and suggest the exploitation of pyrolysis and co-pyrolysis for an improved eco-friendly disposal of hazardous waste. Finally, a novel stochastic mathematical model is presented as valid resource for an effective hazardous waste management.

Scientific online resources as Pubmed and Google Scholar were used to retrieve articles of interest. To screen for the most advanced researches, articles were selected between the years 2020 and 2022 with the following keywords:
hazardous, chemistry, sustainability.

Fine chemicals are pure molecules, used as synthesis intermediates, that are exploited in multiple industrial sectors (e.g., electronics and pharmaceutics). Because of their huge importance in manufacturing, the predominant objective in industry is to ensure that fine chemical production processes are 1) robust, 2) cost effective and 3) sustainable.

The first section of “Fine chemicals & intermediates: insights” considers the different technologies that are based on the use of carbon dioxide (CO2) as C source for the synthesis of fine chemicals. Infact, one way to mitigate the drammatic increase of CO2 emission, and therefore global warming, is to exploit CO2 in catalytic processes for the production of: alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, amines, acid chlorides, alcohols, allyl boronates, alkenyl triflates. The following abstracts include the most recent optimisations in the field, from the thermocatalytic CO2 hydrogenation to methanol via heterogeneous catalysis to the photocarboxylation of substrates with CO2 to build novel C-C bonds.

Finally, the second section of “Fine chemicals & intermediates: insights” highlights the importance of biotechnology in the bio-synthesis of fine chemicals. The utilization of isolated enzymes or whole-cell biocatalysts are pivotal for a more effective and greener production of chiral building blocks. Recent advances in the bio-derivatization of amino acids for the production, for instance, of α-keto acids, amines and alcohols are also presented.

INNOVATIVE, COLLABORATIVE, EFFICIENT, SUSTAINABLE: IS IT WHAT WE ARE IN THIS INDUSTRY FIELD? My