Shaping is a crucial step to produce technical catalysts that remains as some sort of dark art for catalytic researchers in academia. This contribution discusses aspects concerning the fabrication of technical catalysts based on MnO2 powders aimed for the combustion of hazardous aromatic compounds; namely, benzene and styrene. Both laboratory and pilot plant scale catalytic tests were done over tablets and extrudates of MnO2. Key physicochemical properties of these materials; namely, surface area, porosity, crystallinity, and mechanical resistance, were assessed and correlated to the catalytic behaviour. On the one hand, the paper describes the hurdles to be overcome when formulating and testing a technical catalyst whose characteristics must be a good compromise between its physicochemical properties and catalytic behaviour at the pilot plant scale. Furthermore, the importance of adopting adequate security and waste management protocols for testing technical catalysts is highlighted. On the other hand, the following conclusions were drawn from the analysis of results: (i) Between tableting and extrusion, only the latter was found to produce shaped bodies with suitable mechanical resistance for pilot plant scale tests. (ii) Calcination of the fabricated extrudates at temperatures from 500 degrees C leads to a crystallographic transformation of the MnO2 that had a positive impact on the intrinsic activity of the technical catalyst while favouring its mechanical resistance owing to densification at the expense of a decrease in surface area and enlargement of pore size distribution. (iii) Thanks to pilot plant testing of the catalysts, it was possible to identify a detailed reaction scheme for styrene combustion in which besides the occurrence of oxidation, reactions of hydrogenation, dehydrogenation, ring opening, and isomerization take place by a combination of both surface and free radical mechanisms.