In recent years, human activities, the rapid growth of industrialization, and especially the uncontrolled combustion of fossil fuels have unfortunately resulted in the increase of atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2), as a component of greenhouses gases. The long-term effects of this trend have ensued global warming, ice melting, ocean warming, sea-level rising, and ocean acidification which are overall defined as global climate change. Consequently, the development of new carbon capture and utilization systems enabled to minimize CO2 emissions, has become the hottest topic in the scientific communities. On the other hand, CO2 is turned over in the organic chemist's mind as a resource rather than a waste product since it is an abundant, non-toxic, cheap, and renewable C1 feedstock. Therefore, the conversion of anthropogenic CO2 into high value-added chemicals, if performed in a promising sustainable approach, is receiving considerable and ever-increasing attentions. In this context, the direct coupling of CO2 with epoxides not only is significantly interested owing to the eco-friendly and more carbon-balanced approach, but also the resulting five-membered cyclic carbonates are widely used as polar aprotic solvents, electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries, and chemical intermediates in fine chemicals syntheses. However, CO2 is thermodynamically stable and the use of the catalyst for this conversion would be mandatory. Despite a variety of metal and organocatalysts have been so far reported for cyclization reaction between carbon dioxide and epoxides, the development of simple and low-cost systems which met eco-friendly, green and sustainable chemistry viewpoints, under solvent-free and mild temperature (<100 °C) and pressure (1-10 bar) have remained with many challenges. In this presentation, I am going to talk about our recent supported metal and organocatalysts on the mesoporous materials that have been described for direct CO2 valorization to cyclic carbonate.


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