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Green chemistry is a state-of-the art method widely recognized as a useful tool for promoting and enabling sustainable development at both laboratory and industrial scale characterized by the use of environmentally friendly materials such as bacteria, fungi, and different plant species. Metallic nanoparticles exhibit attractive and unique properties due to their reduced size and morphology, which are the basis of development to a variety of useful applications, especially in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and nanomedicine. In the past decades, sustained work has been done to develop new eco-friendly methods for the preparation of well-characterized metallic nanoparticles. Green synthesis removes the limitation of the conventional chemical routes and allows the production of well-defined size and shape metallic nanoparticles with little to no toxicity to humans and environment. To date, hundreds of plant species from different parts of the world have been used for the green synthesis of metallic nanoparticles (with emphasis on silver and gold nanoparticles due to their known antibacterial and antimicrobial activity), with good to excellent results, and therefore, it represents an affordable route for large-scale production. This chapter focuses on the green synthesis of lanthanides- and actinides-based nanoparticles from vegetal materials (plants and plant parts), different microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, algae), or describes other environmentally friendly routes. The focus is on lanthanide oxide- and actinide oxide-based nanomaterials, such as cerium oxide (CeONPs), lanthanum oxide (LaONPs) and their perovskite-type nanoparticles (e.g., LaAlO3), yttrium oxide nanoparticles (Y2O3NPs), their preparation via green chemistry methods and details all the methods used to investigate and characterize the formation of the metallic nanoparticles, such as ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), dynamic light scattering (DLS), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Also, it details the antioxidant, antimicrobial, and antifungal activity of the aforementioned green-synthesized lanthanide- and actinide- based nanoparticles.

Hydroxyapatite is mainly used in biomedical applications because of its very important property—bioactivity. [...]

Noble metallic nanoparticles, silver (AgNPs) and gold (AuNPs) mainly, exhibit good antimicrobial, antibacterial and antifungal properties and, therefore, have a significant contribution to the constant - growing field of nanomedicine. They can be synthesized using both conventional or unconventional methods and, in the last decades especially, the unconventional routes that use plants as raw vegetal materials are studied with proven results. On the other hand, macrocyclic derivatives such as phthalocyanines (Pcs) have photoactive properties and numerous applications. The conjugation between silver and gold nanoparticles with phthalocyanine derivatives considerable increases both the photochemical activity of Pcs as well as the stability of noble metallic nanoparticles. This paper describes recent researches in the field of green synthesized AgNPs and AuNPs from different plants with important pharmacological applications in two different temperature conditions: at room temperature, for 12 hours and at 500 C for 30 minutes. AgNPs and AuNPs then react with tetracarboxamido-zinc phthalocyanine ZnPc(CONH2)4 and octacarboxamido–zinc phthalocyanine ZnPc(CONH2)8 to obtain two hybrid nanoaggregates, confirmed by spectroscopic analyzes (e.g.: UV-Vis, FTIR, DLS, SEM, TEM, XRD) and by determining their antioxidant and antimicrobial activity.

The aim of this study was to assess the properties of some concrete samples according to their [...]

As the development of the textile industry has progressed, intense concerns have been focusedon the contamination of the environment caused by dye pollutants [...]