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Make metal–organic frameworks safe and sustainable by design for industrial translation

Nature Reviews Materials volume 10, pages 167–169 (2025)Cite this article

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Metal–organic frameworks hold immense application potential, but their stability and environmental safety remain barriers to industrial translation. Embracing the ‘safe and sustainable by design’ framework would, however, set a transformative pathway to the development of robust, recyclable metal–organic frameworks, ensuring functionality, minimal ecological impact and alignment with circular economy and chemical sustainability goals.

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Fig. 1: Transformation pathways of metal–organic frameworks.

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Acknowledgements

S.C. acknowledges the UKRI – NERC Independent Research Fellowship (Grant number UKRI187) for supporting this work. D.M. acknowledges NanoDTC Cambridge – EPSRC EP/S022953/1. I.L. and S.K.M. acknowledge the Royal Society International Exchanges grant (IES\R2\232158).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Swaroop Chakraborty, Christian Pfrang & Iseult Lynch

  2. Adsorption and Advanced Materials Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Dhruv Menon & David Fairen-Jimenez

  3. Diamond Light Source, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Chilton, UK

    Iuliia Mikulska

  4. Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, India

    Superb K. Misra

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  1. Swaroop Chakraborty
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  2. Dhruv Menon
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Correspondence to Swaroop Chakraborty or Iseult Lynch.

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Chakraborty, S., Menon, D., Mikulska, I. et al. Make metal–organic frameworks safe and sustainable by design for industrial translation. Nat Rev Mater 10, 167–169 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-025-00774-6

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