Vitamin-Enriched Pharmachar: A Renewable Carbon-Based Organocatalyst

Abstract

The demand for medications has been growing non-stop and this subsequently results in an increase in the amount of pharmaceutical waste being generated year over year. This pharmaceutical waste makes its way into the environment via disposal from manufacturing plants as well as the typical household. The current method of dealing with this waste is through incineration, which tends to release harmful emissions into the atmosphere while also creating ash that is disposed of into landfills, with no valuable application available. To mitigate environmental pollution, as well as create valuable products from this waste material, the process of pyrolysis is employed. With pyrolysis, no ash is produced and instead we get products with potential applications to help the environment rather than harm it. These products, when generated from pharmaceuticals, are denoted as pharmachar, pharmaoil, and pharmagas. Pharmachar is similar to ash, but it has both surface area and porosity which can lead to various applications across a wide range of industries through the process of sorption. This thesis focuses on pharmachar and the adsorption of a vitamin, riboflavin, which has been shown to participate catalytically in photo-redox reactions via a single electron transport mechanism. The goal of this study is to create a renewable and heterogenous carbon based support for this organocatalyst molecule and to investigate the parameters of adsorption, with the future work to assess the photo-catalytic activity of the pharmachar-riboflavin complex.