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EVALUATING METRICS FOR GREEN CHEMISTRIES: INFORMATION AND CALCULATION NEEDS
Citation:
SMITH, R. L. AND M. GONZALEZ. EVALUATING METRICS FOR GREEN CHEMISTRIES: INFORMATION AND CALCULATION NEEDS. Presented at Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference, Washington, DC, June 20 - 24, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
Research within the U.S. EPA's National Risk Management Research Laboratory is developing a methodology for the evaluation of green chemistries. This methodology called GREENSCOPE (Gauging Reaction Effectiveness for the ENvironmental Sustainability of Chemistries with a multi-Objective Process Evaluator), evaluates new chemistries and technologies to determine their sustainability. Sustainability is defined as showing improvement in four areas, called the four E's: efficiency, environment, energy, and economics. Ongoing work has defined metrics for the four E's [1, 2], in terms of economic potentials, environmental impacts, efficiencies, and energy use. More recent work emphasizes the need for specific information to perform evaluations. For instance, a defined stoichiometry of reactions is used to guide the chemist in the selection of reactor products to measure, and then these measurements and stoichiometry are used to calculate mass balances (i.e., effluents) of the reactor system. Following this analysis one can determine the metrics as described above, which can be used to evaluate a new chemistry. Thus, this collaboration between a chemical engineer and chemist determines what information is needed, and what information is available for performing evaluations of green chemistries. Defining the intersection of these aspects provides methods for simplifying the evaluation, and gives the laboratory researcher simple methods for evaluating the effects of bench-scale decisions.