We reviewed magnesiothermic reduction of silica – a scalable route to porous silicon for battery electrodes – and identify the topics for future research.

Up to 84 000 tons of dye can be lost in water, and 90 million tons of water are attributed annually to dye production and their application, mainly in the textile and leather industry, making the dyestuff industry responsible for up to 20% of the industrial water pollution. The majority of dyes industrially used today are aromatic compounds with complex, reinforced structures, with anthraquinone dyes being the second largest produced in terms of volume. Despite the progress on decolorization and degradation of azo dyes, very little attention has been given to anthraquinone dyes. Anthraquinone dyes pose a serious environmental problem as their reinforced structure makes them difficult to degrade naturally. Existing methods of decolorization might be effective but are neither efficient nor practical due to extended time, space, and cost requirements. Attention should be given to the emerging routes for dye decolorization via the enzymatic action of oxidoreductases, which have already a strong presence in various other bioremediation applications. This review will discusses the presence of anthraquinone dyes in the effluents and ways for their remediation from dyehouse effluents, focusing on enzymatic processes.

Despite significant improvements in the synthesis of templated silica materials, post‐synthesis purification remains highly expensive and renders the materials industrially unviable. In this study this issue is addressed for porous bioinspired silica by developing a rapid room‐temperature solution method for complete extraction of organic additives. Using elemental analysis and N2 and CO2 adsorption, the ability to both purify and controllably tailor the composition, porosity and surface chemistry of bioinspired silica in a single step is demonstrated. For the first time the extraction is modelled using molecular dynamics, revealing that the removal mechanism is dominated by surface‐charge interactions. This is extended to other additive chemistry, leading to a wider applicability of the method to other materials. Finally the environmental benefits of the new method are estimated and compared with previous purification techniques, demonstrating significant improvements in sustainability.

We show that the interconnectivity of silicon crystallites determines the final mesoporosity. Applying this mechanism to bioinspired silica enabled us to produce mesoporous silicon with a capacity of 2170 mA h g−1 after 100 cycles.

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