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SIMPLIFYING EVALUATIONS OF GREEN CHEMISTRIES: HOW MUCH INFORMATION DO WE NEED?
Citation:
Smith*, R L. AND M A. Gonzalez*. SIMPLIFYING EVALUATIONS OF GREEN CHEMISTRIES: HOW MUCH INFORMATION DO WE NEED? Presented at AIChE National Meeting, Austin, TX, November 07 - 12, 2004.
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], while more recent work emphasizes the need for specific information to perform evaluations. 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.