This Literature Discussion LO was created for the ACS Inorganic Chemistry Award Winners. Dr. Kit Cummins was the recipient of the 2023 Frederick Hawthorne Award in Main Group Inorganic Chemistry. This LO is based on a recent paper from the group of Dr. Cummins, entitled "Sustainable Production of Reduced Phosphorus Compounds: Mechanochemical Hydride Phosphorylation Using Condensed Phosphates as a Route to Phosphite", published in ACS Central Science, 2022, 8, 332-339.

This paper describes work from the Milstein group in which ruthenium catalysts with pincer ligands are used to depolymerize nylons by breaking the C-N bond and hydrogenating the resulting products to amines and alcohols. Waste plastic is a serious environmental concern that needs a solution. Organometallic chemists put significant effort into finding ways to convert monomers into polymers, and now we must figure out ways to do the reverse.

This LO is a literature discussion based on one figure in Chan et. al.

This 1FLO focuses on the fundamentals of catalysis and the interpretation of catalytic data. The questions guide students through the definition of catalysts, turnover frequency, turnover number, and require the students to extract information from a table of catalytic data. The data set comes from the unprecedented activity of carba-closo-dodecaborate ligated gold catalysts in hydroamination reported by Lavallo and coworkers in 2013 (Lavallo, V.; Wright II, J. H.; Tham, F. S.; Quinlivan, S. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 3172.