Removing the need for the epichlorohydrin recycle would be preferable as it would simplify the system. If the epichlorohydrin excess could be reduced, the economic driver for recycle of the starting material would be eliminated. However, simply reducing the equivalents of epichlorohydrin led to much lower yields, and a large amount of decomposition was observed (Entries 4-5). The root cause was believed to be a heat sensitivity, where bimolecular degradation of the product most likely accelerated at elevated concentrations. To evaluate this hypothesis, the reaction run with 3 or 6 equivalents of epichlorohydrin was simply diluted with inert chlorobenzene to a volume equivalent to that of 10 equivalents of epichlorohydrin. This did indeed provide a significant increase to yield at and above 80% (Entries 6-7). Decreasing temperature to 60 °C was found to be the best solution as it further increases yield, avoids the need for exogenous solvent, greatly increases throughput of material, and renders the system highly economical as compared to glycidol. With the revised synthetic methods now in hand, we then sought Glycidyl pivalate isolation methods. Two solutions struck us as feasible: