Integrated Design and Operation for Sustainability

To attain a sustainable development, chemical process industries are practicing the art of pollution prevention that involves fundamental changes in the processes to minimize the formation of pollutants, as opposed to pollution control, involving end-of-pipe treatment of process emissions. Currently, "green" processes are designed based on concepts of process integration, which embodies a number of closely-related methodologies for designing new products and processes, and retrofitting existing ones by taking into consideration the performance of the entire process as a whole. Integration of product design, process design and operation, and management have been shown to improve the technical, economic, and environmental performance of the peocess industries. This means introducing green engineering principles as early as possible, and at all levels of engineering decision making, starting from discovery and design of new product structures at the molecular level, to management of the logistics for manufacturing and planning with the entire supply chain on the enterprise level.