The scientific aim of this action was to address one of the most important and urgent problems in the chemical synthesis – the development of new electrosynthethic methods that utilize electricity as a sustainable, economic, and traceless reagent. In this way, the action was to advance the current state-of-the art in the electrosynthesis and provide alternatives for traditional chemical synthetic methods (i.e. reagent-based chemistry) to action’s stakeholders. Importantly, the hinderances of the reagent-based chemistry could be circumvented by applying economic and ecologic electrosynthetic methods. Thus, the wider adoptance of these methods could help chemical industries within EU to mitigate CO2 emissions and aid the industry to meet the ambitious carbon dioxide reducement goals in the European Green Deal “Fit for 55”.
Due to Covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to steer the project from experimental work to reviewing the literature. The literature review deals with an urgent, underacknowledged, and important topic – the corrosion of metal cathodes. This subject is tightly bound to the experimental plan and is currently a serious problem that is preventing the translation and implementation of electroorganic synthesis for large-scale chemical manufacturing. Thus, a better acknowledgement of the corrosion of the metal cathodes will play a key part in improving the sustainability of synthetic chemistry and decarbonization of the chemical industry – a point that this work directly addressed.