Glycerol: a promising alternative green solvent for organic transformations: CHEMECA 2017

One of the most important challenges of modern society is to develop sustainable and green solvents that enable chemical processes with a reduced environmental effect. The wide-spread use of solvents in numerous chemical industries and the impact of chemical processes on the environment, combined with declining fossil oil resources, has significantly led to the search for environmentally benign solvent alternatives from renewable resources. Herein, we describe the use of ‘Glycerol’, which is a non-toxic, non-hazardous, non-volatile and recyclable liquid, as a sustainable and more benign alternative reaction medium for selected organic transformations. The unique physical and chemical properties of glycerol such as biodegradability, low toxicity, polarity, high boiling point, ready availability from bio-diesel production process, enables its use as an economically appealing and safe green solvent. Different catalytic reactions including oxidation of benzyl alcohol, C-C coupling, C-N coupling and C-H activation reactions were successfully performed employing glycerol as a green solvent. In all these reactions, the reaction performance was found to be high and the corresponding products were obtained in excellent yields. The utility of glycerol as solvent for organic transformations replacing volatile organic solvents thus makes all these processes simple, safe and cost-effective.