Aqueous transition-metal catalysis

The application of water in organic transition-metal catalysis was from its birth a spontaneous idea, and as such it is rather ill-defined. It is usual to justify research on the use of water in catalytic processes by environmental reasons. Certainly, the trend to get rid of organic solvents is quite common for modern chemical technology. More and more of both end-user products and industrial chemicals, which earlier were invariably associated with organic solvents, such as paints, varnishes, textile processing agents, etc., are now manufactured based on water. This means a decrease in the amount of uncontrolled release of toxic organic wastes into the environment, and a dramatic reduction of the hazards for both industrial personnel and consumers. It is natural to try to propagate this trend back to the reactors in which the chemicals themselves are being produced, in an attempt to make the whole chemical industry function as safely and efficiently as the most sophisticated chemical plant of Nature, the living cell.