Volume 2 Issue 9, September 2025

The rapid commercialization of carbon capture technologies has underscored the need for careful evaluation of sorbents capable of selective CO₂ capture. This Comment identifies several key considerations in taking porous CO₂ capture materials from the laboratory to commercial scale.

This Comment explores why continuous crystallization, despite its success in other industries, remains underutilized in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Among other challenges, we highlight two core issues: the lack of off-the-shelf small-scale equipment with integrated monitoring tools, and the absence of compatible continuous downstream units for filtration and drying, both of which limit practical implementation.

A Telluride Science Workshop on electrochemical separations was convened in early 2025. In this Feature, 17 of the workshop participants share their perspectives and future outlooks on this rapidly growing research area.

Chemical recycling of mixed polyester waste presents a monumental challenge for achieving a circular plastics economy due to material incompatibility and contamination. Now, a catalytic methanolysis process demonstrates a scalable, efficient and selective method for recycling mixed polyester waste.

Membranes with thin polymer layers (<100 nm), typically made via interfacial polymerization with large amounts of organic solvents, are essential for desalination and chemical separations. While membrane chemistry has diversified, fabrication methods have seen only incremental change. Now, a fully aqueous electrochemical synthesis brings innovation to membrane separations.

Advancing the production of covalent organic frameworks toward faster and more sustainable routes is crucial to realizing their potential in large-scale applications. Now, a variety of covalent organic framework platelets with high crystallinity can be produced rapidly using a pressure-assisted hot-pressing strategy.

An engineered confinement device reveals how the microtubule cytoskeleton senses and adapts to its environment by harnessing the interplay between catastrophe instability and branching nucleation.

This Perspective highlights membrane–catalyst systems as a promising approach for difficult large-scale chemical transformations. The authors emphasize the need for integrated design and co-optimization of the membrane and catalysts, especially in the context of oxidative and non-oxidative shale-gas conversion chemistries.

This Review examines membrane and electrochemical technologies for direct lithium extraction, focusing on separation mechanisms, performance trade-offs and the influence of brine composition. It offers a blueprint for treatment train integration and highlights key opportunities and challenges to advance direct lithium extraction toward practical and scalable industrial adoption.

Net-zero bioplastics are possible when combined with high recycling rates. This study presents a mixed polyester recycling process integrated with monomer separation and purification for both fossil- and bio-based plastics. Techno-economic and life cycle analyses confirm its environmental and commercial advantages, advancing the path toward circular, low-emission polyester plastics.

A solid-phase hot-pressing method is introduced, which can rapidly produce highly crystalline covalent organic framework platelets in a convenient, solvent-free manner. Fifteen platelets of various linkage types are produced, with a proof-of-concept demonstration of the resulting high-performing platelet type in an atmospheric water harvesting device.

The lack of reliable coating methods for amorphous zeolitic imidazolate framework (aZIF) materials hinders their development for applications such as photolithography and separation membranes. Supported by computational fluid dynamics modeling, the authors develop a spin-coating technique to deposit aZIF films from dilute precursors and demonstrate their wafer-scale use in advanced lithographic processes.

In pursuit of the hidden secrets and beauty in crystals, Jerry Heng explores the concepts of birth (nucleation), growth, breakage, death and subsequent regeneration.