The urban built environment is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of human habitation, while nature's most successful processes have been honed over millions of years.
Despite the difficulties in making the recycling of plastics economically attractive on a large scale, many successful processes have been developed for more narrowly defined "niche" applications.
Kinetic resolutions of racemic substances are becoming common and successful processes.
Rational strain development by metabolic engineering is crucial to successful processes, and is based on efficient genetic tools and detailed knowledge of metabolic pathways and their regulation.
The successful processes of the future are likely to include current processes with improvements, as well as alternative processes based on new technologies.
Transition metal oxides, in particular vanadium oxides, are the most important catalysts in industrially successful processes for the selective oxidation of aromatics with air (see "Oxidation of aromatic hydrocarbons").
