Green Engineering Approaches to Sustainability

Green Engineering provides a system-based framework for evaluating and improving the environmental performance of chemical processes and products (both new and existing) by integrating consideration of health and environmental risk, green chemistry and pollution prevention approaches into traditional engineering design. Green engineering is a holistic approach to “green” or environmentally friendly development and design of processes and products. Green engineering addresses the risk of chemical processes and products by minimizing both the hazard and exposure components of the risk equation. The green engineering framework can be used for development and design of new processes as well as re-design of existing processes to make them more environmentally friendly. The green engineering concept is best illustrated in Figure 2.1, showing that green engineering includes all aspects of a process design (chemistry, process equipment, emission points, and environmental fate) for their environmental effects.