New research areas inspired by sustainable development

More than 20 years after its birth, green chemistry has definitely entered its golden age. In this account, we highlight some of our progress made over the last 10 years towards the development of green methodologies. We investigated various aspects of green chemistry such as new reagents, catalysts, transformations and solvents and also the utilization of renewable resources. We report herein four mature projects illustrating our efforts in these fields: (1) polyhydrosiloxanes as new reducing agents; (2) glycerol as a new platform for amphiphilic molecules; (3) water, room-temperature ionic liquids and supercritical carbon dioxide as new solvents and (4) C(sp2)–H activation as new C–C bond formation methodology. An overview of each project is given and the potential applications are discussed.