Amines are commonly used intermediaries used to make pharmaceuticals, chemicals for the agricultural and food industries, polymers, and dyes. The current standard methods produce a lot of harmful and unusable waste products. Therefore, a direct catalytic method for the of amines from renewable alcohols, with water as only side product, would environmentally be much more beneficial. LCT members Maarten Sabbe and Javier Ibáñez (formerly University of Lille) contributed to the theory-experiment combined development of a selective catalyst for this process.

Other authors on the study included researchers from France’s National Center for Scientific Research; the University of Lyon, France; the University of Lille, France; the University of California in Los Angeles, USA ;and Solvay, a chemical company headquartered in Brussels.

More info: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-019-0327-2