Sulfamethoxazole (SMX) is a frequently used antibiotic for the treatment of urinary tract, respiratory, and intestinal infections and as a supplement in livestock or fishery farming to boost production. The release of SMX into the environment can lead to the development of antibiotic resistance among the microbial community, which can lead to frequent clinical infections. SMX removal from water is usually done through advanced treatment processes, such as adsorption, photocatalytic oxidation, and biodegradation. Among them, the advanced oxidation process using TiO₂ and its composites is being widely used. TiO₂ is a widely used photocatalyst; however, it has certain limitations, such as low visible light response and quick recombination of e⁻/h⁺ pairs. Integrating the biochar with TiO₂ nanoparticles can overcome such limitations. The biochar-supported TiO₂ composites showed a significant increase in the photocatalytic activities in the UV-visible range, which resulted in a substantial increase in the degradation of SMX in water. The present review has critically reviewed the methods of biochar TiO₂ composite synthesis, the effect of biochar integration with the TiO₂ on its physicochemical properties, and the chemical pathways through which the biochar/TiO₂ composite degrades the SMX in water or aqueous solution. The degradation of SMX using photocatalysis can be considered a useful model, and the research studies presented in this review will allow extending this area of research on other types of similar pharmaceuticals or pollutants in general in the future.

The transformation of furfural into functionalized cyclopentenone derivatives is a smart process to advance the sustainable synthesis of important chemicals from biomass.

1,2,3-triazoles represent a functional heterocyclic core that has been at the center of modern organic chemistry since the beginning of click chemistry. Being a versatile framework, such an aromatic ring can be observed in uncountable molecules useful in medicine and photochemistry, just to name a few. This review summarizes the progress achieved in their synthesis from 2015 to today, with particular emphasis on the development of new catalytic and eco-compatible approaches. In doing so, we subdivided the report based on their degree of functionalization and, for each subparagraph, we outlined the role of the catalyst employed.

The use of eco-compatible synthetic procedures in organic reactions and, in particular, in 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reactions, has recently received a great deal of attention and considerable progress has been achieved in this area in the last years. This review summarizes the approaches currently employed to synthesize heterocyclic compounds by catalyzed 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions in green solvents in the last six years. Our choice to do a selection of the literature from 2014 to 2019 was made considering the absence of a recent review about this period, to our knowledge. Several examples to construct heterocycles by 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions will be discussed in this work subdivided in function of the most important class of non-conventional and green solvents, i.e., ionic liquids (ILs), deep eutectic solvents (DES), and water.

Rearrangement of epoxides is performed with erbium ­triflate as catalyst. In contrast to most proposed catalysts for this reaction, erbium triflate works well with both aromatic and aliphatic epoxides.

The development of novel synthetic routes to produce bioactive compounds starting from renewable sources has become an important research area in organic and medicinal chemistry. Here, we present a low-cost procedure for the tunable and selective conversion of biomass-produced furfural to cyclopentenone derivatives using a mixture of choline chloride and urea as a biorenewable deep eutectic solvent (DES). The proposed medium is a nontoxic, biodegradable, and could be reused up to four times without any unfavorable effect on the reaction yield. The process is tunable, clean, cheap, simple and scalable and meets most of the criteria; therefore, it can be considered as an environmental sustainable process in a natural reaction medium.