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ENVIRONMENTALLY BENIGN PROCESS RESEARCH: LINKING USEPA CHEMICAL PROCESS DESIGN AND SUSTAINABILITY
Citation:
Smith*, R L. ENVIRONMENTALLY BENIGN PROCESS RESEARCH: LINKING USEPA CHEMICAL PROCESS DESIGN AND SUSTAINABILITY. Presented at NSF Workshop: Environmentally Benign Process Research Needs, Pittsfield, MA, August 14 - 16, 2002.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
Interest in sustainability has increased dramatically over the last decade. Declarations have been made on what sustainable development is: meeting today's needs without compromising future needs (Brundtland, 1987). Others have focused on what sustainability means in terms of sustainable schools, communities, etc. As the definitions of these terms go from general to specific the ease of obtaining agreement on them can go from highly cooperative to highly contentious.
Recently, the U.S. EPA, DuPont, and the Council for Chemical Research sponsored a Workshop on Sustainability and Industry where leaders in industry, academia, and government focused on ways to advance issues of sustainability in industry and society. The major areas of discussion included energy, material consumption, and human behavior. In the area of energy the breakout sessions of the workshop suggested three desired outcomes: energy related education of policy makers and the public, energy related metrics, and energy related goals. In the area of material consumption the workshop suggested the need for: national material accounts, integrated industrial models and tools, and bridging scales and disciplines. In the area of human behavior it was suggested that we: educate suppliers and consumers, promote inter-generational planning, and coordinate incentives for long-term thinking. Each of these desirable goals could have a substantial effect on the chemical process industries as well as related industries.
Studying the chemical process industries has been a topic of interest of the U.S. EPA's Process Design and Simulation Team within the Sustainable Technology Division. A major product of this research has been the Waste Reduction Algorithm (WAR) developed by Young and Cabezas (1999). With WAR one can calculate potential environmental impacts to evaluate process design alternatives for their environmental friendliness. WAR uses eight impact categories: human toxicity by ingestion and by dermal/inhalation routes, terrestrial toxicity, aquatic toxicity, photochemical oxidation, acidification, global warming and ozone depletion. Each chemical in the WAR database has a category and chemical specific potential impact value, which when multiplied by the rate of emission gives a potential impact per time. These potential environmental impacts can be compared across various process alternatives.
More recently, Smith (2002a) developed a hierarchical method which can be used to design environmentally friendlier chemical processes. The key of the methodology is to analyze both the economics and the environment at each stage of the design, which allows one to stop work on poor designs early in the procedure. Another aspect, which can be shown through examples, is that the method directs one's focus towards more important areas and aspects of designs. The latest work in this area is examining multiple processes with the idea of incorporating aspects of industrial ecology (i.e., the goal of using byproducts as feeds to other processes) into chemical process design (Smith, 2002b). By using the materials and energy in chemical processes in a way that meets the goals of society, this work links chemical process design to sustainability.
Brundtland Commission, (1987) Our Common Future, The Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Smith, R.L., (2002a) "Evaluating the Economics and Environmental Friendliness of Conceptual Designs for New and Retrofitted Chemical Processes," Clean Techn. Environ. Policy, 3, 383-391.
Smith, R.L., (2002b) "An Industrial Ecology Perspective of Chemical Process Design," AIChE National Meeting, paper 21f, Indianapolis, IN.
Young, D.M. and Cabezas, H., (1999) "Designing Sustainable Processes with Simulation: The Waste Reduction (WAR) Algorithm," Comp. Chem. Enging., 23, 1477-1491.