Sustainability in Organic Synthesis: Polymer Functionalization, A3-Coupling, and Photocatalysis

Throughout the course of history up to the present, our society is experiencing a manifold series of crises, resulting in the disruption of the supply chain, energy emergency, shortage of fossil resources, and environmental pollution; giving rise to the so called polycrisis. With the purpose of remediating World Organizations have published a series of guidelines for sustainable development, including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Green Deal, the model of Circular Economy (CE), and the Green Chemistry (GC) concept. As chemists is essential to develop innovative and sustainable synthetic approaches to small organic molecules (often heteroatomic), and polymeric materials. The work here presented had the objective to investigate innovative and sustainable synthetic approaches applied to small heteroatomic entities and polymer functionalisation. This work was carried out in Prof. Marcantoni’s research group at the University of Camerino (Chemistry Interdisciplinary Project, ChIP, Camerino, Italy), with the collaboration of Fratelli Guzzini® S.p.A (Recanati, Italy), and in Prof. Teskey’s research group from January 2023 to July 2023 at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) (Aachen, Germany). The first chapter presents an overview of how chemistry influences sustainability and vice versa, both from the synthetic and plastic materials point of view, highlighting the importance of heteroatomic compounds in these two chemistry fields. Chapter two details the synthesis of a derivative of BHT with inherent antioxidant properties. This derivative is subsequently employed for the functionalization of polyethylene terephthalate. The resulting material acquires antioxidant properties, potentially rendering it suitable for applications in active food packaging. This project was carried out in collaboration with Fratelli Guzzini® S.p.A at the laboratories of Prof. Marcantoni. The third chapter describes the work realized at University of Camerino, during which a sustainable asymmetric A3 -coupling method was investigated for secondary proparglyamines synthesis. The final chapter, fourth, discloses the development of a dual-catalysed reductive coupling for synthetising tertiary alcohols, the work was carried out in Prof. Teskey laboratories.