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.

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.

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 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.

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.