Progress towards environmentally responsible processing is marked by the elimination of waste and by-product generation and reduced dependence on hazardous chemicals. The key to both is often provided by catalytic as alternatives to stoichiometric processes. Heterogeneous catalysis,long established in bulk-chemicals processing, is beginning to make inroads into the fine-chemicals industry also. This tendency is helped by the availability of novel catalytic materials and modern techniques of creating and investigating specific active sites on catalyst surfaces. In this overview, examples from the areas of acid/base and redox catalysis are chosen to illustrate the trend from non-catalytic to catalytic processes.