Recovery and Reuse of Noble Transition Metals

Transition metal-catalyzed processes are inherently sustainable. When noble transition metals are a requisite, catalyst recovery and reuse is studied. However, concerns of feedstocks of noble transition metals on a mid-term basis (25 years) and their geographical distribution on earth have resulted in a strong request of the fine chemicals industry to develop protocols based on base metals. Realistically, for several processes it will simply not be possible to identify an un-noble variant with sufficiently high TON and TOF values to be industrially applicable. Therefore our research group in collaboration with VITO (Flemish Institute for Technological Research) studies the recovery and reuse of noble transition metal catalysts based on membrane separation (OSN = Organic Solvent Nanofiltration).