Producing Today and Preserving Tomorrow Looking at SUSTAINABILITY from a Chemical Engineer’s Perspective

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Producing Today and Preserving TomorrowLooking
at SUSTAINABILITY from a Chemical Engineers
Perspective
CHE 4343 Environmental Engineering Sustainability
Seminar April 19, 2004, EN516

• Xun Jin
• School of Chemical Engineering
• Oklahoma State University

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Outline

• From utopia to real
• Sustainability in general
• Why?
• History and Milestones
• Concept and characteristics
• Sustainability from Chemical Engineers
  perspective
• Difficulties and challenges
• Sustainability Assessment
• Metrics
• Frameworks
• Decision Making for sustainability

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A Utopia ?

• Communism
• Communism is a society without money, without a
  state, without property and without social
  classes.
• The circulation of goods is not accomplished by
  means of exchange quite the contrary, the
  by-word for this society is "from each according
  to their abilities, to each according to their
  needs".

Karl Marx 1818-1883 Feb. 23, 1948
Vladimir Lenin 1870-1924 Apr. 24, 1964
Zedong Mao 1893-1976 Jan. 13, 1967
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Real ?
Sustainable Development The development
that meets the needs of the current generation
without compromising the future generations to
meet their own needs. (WCED, 1987) Improvi
ng the quality of life while living within the
carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems
(UNEP, 1991) You are not robbing Peter to
pay Paul (W. Stavropoulos, Dow CEO)
Earth Jan. 2, 1989
Energy Jul. 2, 1979
Global Warming Apr. 9, 2001
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Questions to ask
Are they ideologically great concepts?
Are these concepts submitted at a right
time?
Is the way that they were interpreted
realistic?
How far are they from implementation?
How many things we can do to move closer?
What lesson we can learn from the story of
communism?
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Why sustainability?
Fact 1 IPCC predicts a 5.8 temperature rise in
this century.
Fact 2 The U.S. is home to 5 of the world's
population, yet consumes 26 of the world's
energy.
Fact 3 In the US, 86 of apple 95 of cabbage,
91 of field maize and 81 of tomato varieties no
longer exist .
Fact 4 by the year 2025, two-thirds of the
worlds peoples will suffer from water shortages
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History and Milestones

• Environmentalism the Precursor
• 1830s New England Transcendentalist Movement
• 1901 Muirs book Our National Parks
• 1962 Carsons book Silent Spring
• 1970 First Earth Day
• 1970s Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, EPA
• Contemporary Environmentalism
• 1972 UNs Conference on Human Environment
  and UNEP
• 1981 Brown published Building a
  Sustainable Society

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History and Milestones (cont.)

• Emergence of sustainability
• 1987 WCED published Our Common Future
  (Brundtland Report)
• 1992 UNCED (Earth Summit) held in Rio de
  Janeiro, Brazil
• (Agenda 21 in Rio Declaration)
• 1993 Presidents Council on Sustainable
  Development, US
• 1997 J. Elkington published Cannibals with
  Folks
• (Triple Bottom Line)
• 2002 Second Earth Summit held in
  Johannesburg, South Africa

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What is sustainability ?
SUSTAINABILITY ?

Global warming
Biodiversity
National security
Poverty
Ozone Layer
GDP
Fossil fuel
Eco-efficiency
Landscape
Population
Renewable energy
Crime rate
Acid Rain
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Global Warming

• Rising temperature ? Rising sea level ?
  Forest
• Precipitation Crop
  yields
• Other climate
  conditions Water supply
• 
  Human and eco-health

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Ozone

• Upper ozone
• Increased UV radiation
• ? Skin cancer
• Cataract
• Crop
• Tree

• Lower ozone
• Generated ground level ozone
• ? respiratory system
• vegetation and ecosystem

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Sustainability Concept

• Huge diversity in conceiving sustainability
• Three classes of views
• Inter/intra-generation equity view
• Fairly developed well-beings of human society
  not only within but between generations
• Critical limits view
• Quality of human life can be improved only
  within the planets carrying capacity
• Competing objective view
• Simultaneously meet multiple environmental,
  economic and social objectives

Environmental
Economic
Social
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Sustainability Characteristics

• Parris Kate Broad appeal and little
  specificity
• Jin High

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So far we know that

• Sustainability is
• A grand concept
• Ill-defined somehow
• Has a short history
• Easier said than done
• Reconcile two extremes
• Virtually handled in case-specific manner

I am sustainable
I am sustainable
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Break Questions
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Chemical Engineers Perspective
Raw materials
Products
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Chemical Engineers Difficulties

• Conceptual intricacy
• Perspective diversity
• Knowledge deficiency
• Relevancy emphasis

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Design a Chemical Process

• Kinetics
• Thermodynamics
• Mass, Heat and Momentum Transport
• Fluid Mechanics
• Modeling
• Optimization

Flowsheet synthesis optimization
Utility systems waste treatment
Heat exchanger network
Separation and recycle systems
Reactor
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Tasks to conquer
Williams-Otto Process

• How to assess its sustainability performance?
• How to make it more sustainable?
• How to determine whether it is more sustainable?

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A solution scheme
Green Chemistry Green Engineering Pollution
prevention Source reduction End-of-pipe
Williams-Otto process
Assessment
?
Decision Making
Improvement
?
Completion
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Measuring Environmental Sustainability

• Reporting demand
• - 45 Fortune Global Top 250 companies
• - 36 Fortune U. S. Top 100 companies
• - 100 Process Industry sectors
• publish an annual sustainability report

• Chemical Industry
• - Responsible Care Program
• - Sustainability Institute AICHE
• - ICCA Report to the United Nation
• - Corporate Sustainability Reports

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Metrics

• Applying Metrics is the dominant practice
• Metric sets instead of a single metric
• International Institute of SD Over 500 sets
• Varies from global, national, regional, local,
  corporate to site
• Some examples
• Dow Jones Sustainability Index
• AICHE Sustainability metrics
• IChemE Sustainability metrics
• Environmental Sustainability Index

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AICHE Metrics

• Mass intensity (i.e. total mass in/ of product
  sold)
• Energy intensity
• Greenhouse gases (i.e. kg CO2 equivalent/ of
  product sold)
• Photochemical Ozone Creating Potential
• Acidification
• Eutrophying Substance
• Water usage
• Human health
• Ecotoxicity (i.e. Mi (Pi BCFi)/LC50,i )
• Each may have one core metric and some
  complementary metrics

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Metric Example
Benzene
Impact from Ground level ozone formation?
Metric?
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Metric Example

• Ground level ozone formation

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Metric Example (cont.)

• Alternative metrics for ground ozone formation

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Metric Transformations

• Paradigm shift Greening to Sustaining
• - NAE NRC (1999)

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A SSEIW Hierarchy

• Stressor
• The discharges associating with a given human
  activity

• Status
• The induced state change of the exact
  environmental compartment that the stressors are
  directly exerted on

• Effect
• The resulting environmental impacts that embody
  certain aspect of societal concern

• Integrality
• Component completeness, structural rationality
  and functionality of the environment as a whole

• Well-being
• The damages caused by all the prior aspects to
  human welfare

CFCs emission
Stressor
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Assessment Frameworks
Life Cycle Assessment
Ecological Risk Assessment
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Comparative vs. Absolute
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2
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Comparative Assessment
vs.
Process 1
Process 2

• Performance influenced only by inherent
  properties of processes
• Not site- and time-specific
• Usually use chemical ranking or scoring system
• More often used by chemical process designer

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Absolute Assessment
Exposure pathway
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Absolute Assessment (cont.)

• Rigorous analysis
• Site- and time-specific
• Fate and transport models
• Exposure characterization inhalation, ingestion,
  dermal
• Effect characterization
• Needmeteorological, geological,
  hydrogeological, population etc. data

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MultiCriteria Decision Making (MCDM)
Environmental burden
Reliability
Price
Profit
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General characteristics of MCDM

• Criteria are mutually independent and
  incommensurable
• Usually no best alternative in terms of all
  criteria
• More or less subjective
• Decision has to be made by decision-maker
• Mostly studied in Operations Research
  Management Science

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DM for Sustainability

• In nature a MCDM
• Number of criteria may be large
• Some criteria are ill-defined
• Criterias relative significance varies with
  interest
• Inadequate information and higher uncertainty
• Multiple decision-parties often involved

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MultiCriteria Decision Aiding

• Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)
• Outranking
• Reference Point
• Goal Programming
• Compromise Programming
• Utility Function

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Questions