Citation:

Harten, P., T. Martin, D. Chang, AND D. Young. Finding Potential Replacements for TRI Solvents Using the Environmental Impact of the Average Solvent. JOURNAL OF SOLUTION CHEMISTRY. Plenum Press, New York, NY, 51:838-849, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10953-022-01174-y

Impact/Purpose:

There are more than 20 million tons of solvent used per year. This article shows how the PARIS III Solvent Substitution Software finds replacements for three solvents that appear in EPA's Toxic Release Inventory(TRI). The replacements chosen have very similar properties to the three TRI solvents selected yet reduce harm to human health and the environment by an order of magnitude. Solvent engineers can use these solvent mixtures in their industrial processes instead of the harmful TRI solvents. The PARIS III software is designed to help users find replacements for harmful solvents which can reduce industrial solvent waste world-wide.

Description:

A solvent has many different types of impact on the environment. This article describes a method that combines several different types of impacts together into one environmental index so that similar solvents may be compared by their cumulative impact to the environment. The software tool PARIS III (Program for Assisting the Replacement of Industrial Solvents III) initially finds thousands of solvents mixtures with behaviors as close as possible to those of the original solvent entered. The overall environmental impacts of these solvent mixtures are estimated and assigned to environmental indexes. Users of the software tool can then choose replacements for the original solvent with similar activities but with significantly smaller environmental indexes. These solvent mixtures may act as practical substitutes for the industrial solvents but substantially reduce the overall environmental impact of the original harmful solvents. Potential replacements like this are found for three of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory solvents, carbon tetrachloride, toluene, and N-methylpyrrolidone.

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