The catalytic process, discovered by researchers at UC Berkeley, efficiently reduces polymers to chemical precursors, bringing a circular economy for plastics one step closer to reality.
Illustration: A catalyst (center) based on iridium (blue ball) can snip a hydrogen atom (white balls) off a terminal methyl group (upper and lower left) to add a boron-oxygen compound (pink and red) that is easily swapped out for more complicated chemical groups. The reaction works on simple hydrocarbon chains (top reaction) or more complicated carbon compounds (bottom reaction)....
While plastic bags clog the waste stream, recycling them isn’t financially attractive, since they’re usually turned into very low-value products. If polyethylene packaging could be processed into high-value products, more of them would be recycled instead of ending up in landfills. (photo: Adobe Stock)
While many cities and eight states have banned single-use plastics, bags...
Artist’s rendering of a copper nanoparticle as it evolves during CO2 electrolysis: Copper nanoparticles (left) combine into larger metallic copper “nanograins” (right) within seconds of the electrochemical reaction, reducing CO2 into new multicarbon products.(Credit: Yao Yang/Berkeley Lab)...
John Hartwig, Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the 2021 ACS Arthur C. Cope Award for the discovery, development, and mechanistic elucidation of practical reactions...
The College is pleased to announce that Dean Toste will serve as the next chair of the Department of Chemistry in the College of Chemistry, effective July 1, 2023.
Dean has been a member of the chemistry faculty since 2002, when he was appointed as an assistant professor by then-chair Judith Klinman. As a world-renowned synthetic organic chemist,...
The 2021 Eastman Lectures in Catalysis features speakers Professor Regina Palkovit, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen/Germany; , Professor Paul J. Dauenhauer, University of Minnesota; and Professor David W. Flaherty, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The event is being held on March 23, 2021.
Angewandte Chemie International Edition | Press Release
The carbon–hydrogen bonds in alkanes—particularly those at the ends of the molecules, where each carbon has three hydrogen atoms bound to it—are very hard to “crack” if you want to replace the hydrogen atoms with other atoms. Methane (CH4) and ethane (CH3CH3) are made up, exclusively, of such tightly bound hydrogen atoms. In the...
Artist’s rendering of a copper nanoparticle as it evolves during CO2 electrolysis: Copper nanoparticles (left) combine into larger metallic copper “nanograins” (right) within seconds of the electrochemical reaction, reducing CO2 into new multicarbon products.
