Jagadeesh Varma Nallaparaju

This Centre of Excellence (CoE) focuses on fostering innovation in resource efficiency, promoting circular economy practices, utilizing local resources, ensuring safe material circulation, and educating researchers to reduce environmental impacts. It centers around four key areas: Strategic Mineral Resources (SMR), Carbon-Based Resources (CBR), Circular Technologies Upscaling (CTU), and Circular Business Eco-System and Modeling (CBEM). The SMR group maps critical materials in waste streams, including renewables, for extraction and reuse while minimizing hazardous waste. The CBR group develops ecofriendly pathways for essential chemicals and plastics, also assessing their environmental impact. The CTU group pioneers waste reduction and recycling methods for aqueous, and solid waste, incl. water purification. The CBEM group analyzes sustainable business ecosystems and value chains. This CoE's interdisciplinary approach will benefit both Estonia and Europe by advancing circular economy.

Sensing, capturing and separating enantiomers is important for environmental safety, agricultural chemistry, and drug design. The use of hemicucurbiturils is an effective strategy because of the combination of various monomers in a single-step templated mechanochemical synthesis. Due to the absence of bulk solvent the self-organizing efficiency is amplified and there is less waste - the process is green and sustainable. The current work will study the fundamentals of self-organization of hemicucurbiturils, the binding (capturing) of chiral molecules, and detecting chirality using supramolecular complexes. In the long term, the empirical observations will be combined with results from computational chemistry and cheminformatics to build models for predicting necessary monomers and reaction conditions to form macrocycles with desired properties. The outcomes of the project are expected to be highly useful for organizations and industries that monitor, use, or manufacture chiral compounds

The project is aimed at changing the current paradigm of using oil shale by direct transformation of its valuable structural components into high-value chemicals, with the goal of developing an environmentally friendly chemical industry. The focus is set on expanding advanced methods for obtaining base chemicals through the chemical transformation of kerogens from various sources, as well as developing environmentally friendly holistic solutions. These efforts aim to enhance the efficiency of using other geological resources and allow for the utilization of already generated waste. The objective is to develop innovative uses for raw materials that create added value, find applications for residual oil shale in waste rock piles, and align with green transition strategies. The focus is on Estonian mineral resources, but the project also envisions the utilization of other difficult-to-transform organic materials for obtaining chemicals.