(706f) Quantification of Physical and Monetary Benefits of Forest Ecosystem: A Case Study for Net Positive Impact Manufacturing

Over the last few decades, chemical engineering has made immense effort to minimize its impact on environment. Manufacturing facilities have employed approaches like heat and mass integration, waste reduction algorithm and eco-industrial parks to reduce the environmental impacts of its activities [1]. Often these reductions in impacts at individual unit operations scale are not reflected across the supply chain. Incorporation of life cycle assessment method in sustainable process and supply chain design helped identify the trade-offs among economical and environmental objectives while reducing the impacts across the life cycle of a product or process. While this set of methods reduced impacts, environmental pollution in form of water and air quality issues persisted among the major cities in the United States. As conventional engineering ignore ecological capacity to sustain human impacts, often these reduced impacts lead to ecological overshoot. These ecological overshoot leads to environmental pollution and destruction of natural ecosystems.

Alternatively, paradigm of engineering design can be expanded to include ecosystem capacity using the framework of Techno-Ecological Synergy (TES) [2]. TES proposes a set of multi-scale sustainability indices that can account for ecosystem capacity across local, regional and global scale. Compared to conventional engineering design, TES framework aims to minimize ecological impact by improving the process efficiency as well as increasing the capacity of ecosystems. Design based on TES framework can benefit from use of ecosystem service, thus leading to a economical and environmentally win-win solution. Reliance on ecosystems for sustainable operation of technological system incentivizes expansion and protection of required ecosystems.

For a nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) abatement case study, Shah and Bakshi [3] demonstrated that a TES design can lead to environmentally and economically win-win solutions. They considered a forest ecosystem along with technocentric selective catalytic reducer (SCR) to design and operate a chloralkali production facility under strict NO₂ sustainability requirement. Along with NO₂ abatement, forest ecosystem provides additional benefits of regulating sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter. Reforestation also provides the water quality regulation, water provisioning and soil quality regulation service. Quantifying the additional benefits from a TES system would help evaluate the net positive impacts of this novel designs.

In this work, we expand their methods to account for other criteria air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter (PM_2.5). Including other criteria air pollutants in the study favors the use of ecological solution as unlike the technological alternatives same ecological unit can simultaneously process all the criteria air pollutant. We employ US EPA’s Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program (BenMAP) [4] to quantify the trade-off of social cost of pollution with economical cost of pollution abatement. This benefits are normalized for seasonal intermittency of forest-based ecosystem capacity. We further account for environmental flows like water and carbon dioxide to demonstrate the effect of reforestation on water availability in the region along with climate regulation potential. This study quantifies the net positive impacts of TES design and motivate establishment of mutually beneficial relationships that are economically, ecologically, and societally sustainable solutions.

References

[1] Bhavik R. Bakshi. Toward Sustainable Chemical Engineering: The Role of Process Systems Engineering. Annual Reviews in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Accepted, 2019.

[2] Bhavik R. Bakshi, Guy Ziv, and Michael D. Lepech. Techno-ecological synergy: A framework for sustainable engineering. Environmental science & technology, 49(3):1752–1760, Feb 3, 2015.

[3] Utkarsh Shah and Bhavik R. Bakshi. Accounting for nature’s intermittency and growth while mitigating no 2 emissions by technoecological synergistic design-application to a chloralkali process. Journal of Advanced Manufacturing and Processing, 0(0):e10013, Mar 28, 2019.

[4] OAR US EPA. Environmental benefits mapping and analysis program - community edition (benmap-ce), -03-14T15:20:04-04:00 2014.