Abstract A simple catalytic system that uses commercially available manganese (II) perchlorate as the catalyst and peracetic acid as the oxidant is found to be very effective in the epoxidation of aliphatic terminal alkenes with high product selectivity at ambient temperature. Many terminal alkenes are epoxidised efficiently on a gram scale in less than an hour to give excellent yields of isolated product (> 90%) of epoxides in high purity. ...