Copper Catalyzed Selective Oxidation of Benzyl Alcohol to Benzaldehyde

Unfortunately, these methods often require oneor more equivalents of these relatively expensive oxidiz-ing agents. Some of these processes also generate equalamounts of metal waste. Furthermore, oxidation reactionsare usually carried out in halogenated organic solvents,typically chlorinated hydrocarbons, which are environ-mentally undesirable. Therefore, developing green, selec-tive and efficient catalysts for the oxidation of alcohols isof paramount importance for both economic and envi-ronmental reasons.During our investigation on selective oxidation reac-tions we recently developed economical method for theoxidation of acetophenone to benzoic acid by using cop-per chloride in DMSO.