The quest for sustainability: Challenges for process systems engineering

Life cycle assessment (LCA) applied to the process industry: a review

“…This field "develops methods and tools that allow industry to meet its needs by tying science to engineering" (Grossmann et al 2004), and encompasses a vast range of industries, such as petrochemical, mineral processing, advanced material, food, pharmaceutical and biotechnological. The significant accomplishments and the future challenges for PSE are summed up in Table 1 (Bakshi and Fiksel 2003;Grossmann et al 2004;Grossmann and Westerberg 2000). As well as these accomplishments and challenges, PSE has played an important role over the last decade by developing many useful concepts, tools and techniques for improving the viability of chemical processes, making them more and more industrially feasible (Grossmann et al 2004), e.g.…”

“…For example, in the chemical industry, DfE is apparent via development of "green" chemical routes, process intensification and process redesign (Bakshi and Fiksel 2003). According to Ernzer et al (2003), most results end up in scientific publications rather than being transferred into practice, which implies that the number of design methods and tools used in the industry is relatively small compared to the number of existing ones.…”

Environmental and economic comparison of waste solvent treatment options

“…Great efforts are made in order to reach these aims [2,3]. Among these efforts, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards Program to 'recognize and support fundamental and innovative chemical methodologies that are useful to industry and that accomplish pollution prevention through source reduction' [4][5][6].…”

“…First the Eco-indicator points for the total incineration and total recovery are determined using equations (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15). The different elements of the environmental contributions and the total impacts are shown in Table 4.…”

“…represents the environmental impacts caused by the industrial production of the components in the waste solvent mixture. This is the product of the massflow of the i th solvent component (ṁ i ) in the waste solvent stream and the specific impact indicator (i i,prod ) referring to the petrochemical production of the i th component, as shown in Equation (2).…”