(642b) Process Intensification and Integration Potential in Manufacturing Pollution Prevention

Process intensification (PI) aims to dramatically improve manufacturing processes through the application of novel process systems and equipment. The novel approaches can be used to overcome bottlenecks, such as those imposed by thermodynamics, or to combine processing phenomena into fewer processing units with a concurrent reduction of capital and operation and maintenance costs and energy, water and materials intensity. PI approach goes beyond the incremental improvements achieved through optimizing existing equipment and process systems and achieves step changes in energy and materials efficiency, total life-cycle cost reduction, and environmental impact by minimizing wastes at the sources via various hierarchy pollution prevention techniques.
Our goal is to modify industrial processes so that services and manufactured goods can be produced without waste. But it is important to understand that some manufacturing processes inherently produce wastes, even after all reasonable efforts at pollution prevention. Thus in some cases the use of a conversion technology may be more appropriate than a program of pollution prevention: many industrial wastes can be processed to render them viable as material inputs to another industry or to part of an industrial cluster of several connected industries - as part of the movement of “industrial ecology”. Two separate case studies are presented that highlight a profitable industrial “by-product-to-new products (Das, 2020).

Reference: Das, T.K. (2020). Industrial Environmental Management: Engineering, Science and Policy, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.