Projects

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 eco-friendly 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.

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 eco-friendly 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.

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 eco-friendly 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.

The efficient utilisation of bio-based resources is essential for achieving a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. AGRI-WASTE2H2 will focus on straw-derived cellulose – an abundant but underexploited agricultural side-product – as feedstock in an advanced electrochemical process, tailored for enhanced efficiency in the production of green hydrogen with significantly reduced energy consumption compared to standard water electrolysis. At the same time, the process will concurrently produce valuable platform chemicals and materials. AGRI-WASTE2H2 relies on the combined expertise of researchers in three Nordic-Baltic countries – Finland, Sweden and Estonia. The Synthetic Flow Chemistry group at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, will focus on transferring the electrochemical oxidation of cellulose into the flow regime, aiming to achieve high efficiency and productivity of the developed transformation. The scaling-up process in flow is a key step for a successful industrial application. AGRI-WASTE2H2 capitalises on the abundance of renewable electricity and agricultural side-streams in the Nordic-Baltic area to produce fuel and chemicals, thereby alleviating the region’s dependence on import of fossil feedstocks. As such, the project will result in tools for reduced CO2 emissions and increased regional resilience, while spurring the growth of new green industries of particular benefit for rural areas. The collaboration between researchers three Nordic-Baltic countries will enable results beyond what the individual partner can achieve alone and promote regional mobility and new collaborations. By leveraging our specialised know-how, we aim to drive innovation tailored to our regional needs and strengths.

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.

Organic electrochemistry is transforming modern synthesis by offering green, efficient methods that replace toxic oxidants and reductants with electricity. Continuous flow electrosynthesis, superior to batch processes, addresses challenges like heat transfer, mixing, and scalability enabling lab-scale replication of industrial methods. This project targets the sustainable synthesis of alkyl and fluoroalkyl hypervalent iodine reagents (λ3-iodanes) using electrochemical flow methods. Traditionally generated with stoichiometric oxidants, these reagents cause waste and separation issues. Electrochemical strategies allow access to unstable aliphatic iodanes cleanly. Their use in stereoselective α-alkylation, amination, and nucleophilic (radio)fluorination and fluoroalkylation reactions will be explored. This work aligns with the European Green Deal, advancing green chemistry and innovation in sustainable catalysis.

Asymmetric catalysis plays one of the most important roles in the modern organic chemistry providing methods for the synthesis biologically active compounds and pharmaceuticals. Merging well-developed organocatalysis with electrochemistry opens new horizons for asymmetric transformation beyond the classical thermochemical activation. This approach is sustainable, since it employs harmless organocatalysts to induce chirality and electrons as traceless and green reagents to generate highly reactive radical species under mild reaction conditions avoiding the utilization of highly toxic and expensive RedOx chemicals. The efficiency and reliability of such transformations can be enhanced by performing the reaction in continuous-flow mode. The project is an example of cutting-edge science combining different research areas of organic synthesis and chemical engineering that can be potentially applied for discovery of new and potent life-saving drugs.

This research aims to determine the properties of different DCA mixtures produced from oil shale, determining which DCA mixtures are most efficient as plasticizers, determine the usable temperature range for DCA ester plasticizers and demonstrate the availability of energetic plasticizers that are free from non-NATO imports.

The project is focused on the development of a new energy and source efficient transformation, which can be potentially integrated into an industrial process. Synthetic electrochemistry attracts more and more attention as an alternative to classical thermochemical reactions that require toxic and expensive transition-metal-catalysts or stoichiometric amounts of harmful and wasteful oxidants. In electrochemical reactions, electrons are used as “traceless and green reagents” to generate highly reactive radical particles under the mild reaction condition providing access to the previously unapproachable reaction pathways. Moreover, the potential to harvest sustainable solar or wind energy makes electrochemistry even more attractive. In the framework of this project, we have successfully demonstrated a novel electrochemical approach for the synthesis of aryl oxygen compounds that does not require the use of oxidants nor metal catalysts. These type of compounds are widely used precursors for synthesis of valuable polymers, complex bioactive molecules and are common structural motifs in many natural products. In our research we have used an inexpensive self-manufactured setup to perform electrochemical transformation in continuous-flow, which allowed us to develop a reliable and scalable process that makes it particularly interesting for the chemical industry.