Citation:

Agbleze, S., S. Li, E. Quintanar Orozco, Gerardo J. Ruiz-Mercado, AND F. Lima. Current Progress in Sustainability Evaluation, Pollution Prevention, and Source Reduction Using GREENSCOPE. Edition 1st, Chapter 14, Eric C.D. Tan (ed.), Sustainability Engineering Challenges, Technologies, and Applications. CRC Press - Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, Boca Raton, FL, , 289-318, (2023). https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003167693

Impact/Purpose:

During the manufacturing, industrial use, and end-of-life (EoL) of chemicals, the estimation of releases is critical for environmental, health, and safety evaluations. Toxicity, acidification, smog, and many other environmental impacts are directly related to environmental releases. For example, for toxicity, risk assessments depend on the amount of chemical released, the exposure people have, and the hazardous effects of the chemical. Similarly, other environmental impacts are determined through combining releases and impact characterizations. Therefore, estimating environmental releases is a critical step in evaluating the effects of manufacturing, processing, using, and EoL of chemicals. This peer-reviewed book chapter describes recent efforts to estimate releases and evaluate indicators for chemical manufacturing with case studies for existing chemicals, new manufacturing processes, and dynamic performances. Also, this product describes GREENSCOPE tool indicators capable of assessing the sustainability of chemicals synthesized from a laboratory-scale reaction or manufactured in a plant-scale reaction. Moreover, this contribution describes how internal and external stakeholders can apply GREENSCOPE to inform the development of more sustainable chemicals by reducing their environmental and human health impacts, implementing pollution prevention, source reduction while increasing economic and social benefits.

Description:

In the evaluation and analysis of candidate process and product designs, several studies are performed including parametric and topological optimization to select operating conditions, raw materials, types of utilities, equipment, and specific flowsheet configurations based on defined criteria. However, these studies typically only provide the potential economic performance of the process, leaving stakeholders with little insight into the energy footprint, transformation efficiency, and potential impacts on the environment and human health. In this work, GREENSCOPE (Gauging Reaction Effectiveness for the ENvironmental Sustainability of Chemistries with a multi-Objective Process Evaluator) is introduced as a tool to perform comprehensive sustainability analysis and assess environmental and human health impact benefits by pollution prevention and source reduction efforts. In particular, the data requirements, metrics, and interfaces currently available in GREENSCOPE are summarized. Additionally, this tool is demonstrated with new case studies and process systems applications including the assessment of an acetic acid process with two separation schemes, a novel biorefinery process when operated at steady state, and the dynamic assessment for optimization and control of a coal/biomass co-gasification process.

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