An NHC/iron cooperative catalytic system mediates the aerobic oxidative esterification of aldehydes with phenols. The use of equimolar amounts of reactants led to good to excellent isolated yields of esters.

This feature article is a description of the achievements made on the development of attractive sustainable approaches to synthetic organic chemistry, namely, catalyst reuse by simple dissolution in water and ionic liquids and asymmetric transformations induced by readily available chiral ionic liquids.