With the rapid development of economy and enhancement of people's awareness for environmental protection, environmental catalysis and eco-materials have become one of the most rapidly developing disciplines in the fields of catalysis and materials. Therefore, we organized the 11^th National Conference on Environmental Catalysis and Eco-Materials (11^th NCECM 2018), which was held on July 20–23, 2018 at Shenyang Normal University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China. Our objectives were the following: to display the latest progress and new achievements for environmental catalysis in recent years in our country; to analyze the facing opportunities, challenges and future development direction in the fields of environmental catalysis and eco-material; to promote in-depth discussion among the experts; to communicate with each other among production, study and research units; and to further promote the development and progress of environmental catalysis and eco-materials science and technology in our country.

More than 780 participants, from academic and industrial units in fields of environmental catalysis and eco-materials from China and abroad, attended the conference, and 7 plenary lectures, 33 keynote lectures, 32 invited talks, 80 oral, 43 fast oral and 340 poster presentations were delivered at the conference. Presentation topics included catalytic oxidation of volatile organic compounds, elimination of NO_x, catalytic combustion of soot particles, photocatalysis, biomass transformation, materials for the environmental protection and so on. We would like to thank all the domestic and foreign participants for their presentations and attendances, and we would especially like to express our sincere thanks to the plenary, keynote and invited lecture speakers for their splendid presentations.

This special column contains 5 invited papers that cover the most important aspects of environmental catalysis, including catalytic elimination of NO, the catalytic oxidation of VOCs such as methanol, visible light photocatalytic removal of NO_x, research progress on efficient photocatalysis of heterogeneous /homogeneous junction, photocatalytic degradation of RhB and reduction of CO₂.

As a guest editor, I express our sincere thanks to the authors who contributed to this special column. We also thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions for improving the papers. Finally, we would like to thank the Editors of Chinese Journal of Catalysis for handling the manuscripts, and the editorial staffs of the journal for their helps in preparing this special column.