What Is in the Book?
Chapter 1: This chapter addresses why industrial environmental management is important! Environmental management is a very crucial part of human well‐being that needs to be deeply considered. Formulated design seeks to steer the development process to take advantage of opportunities, avoid hazards, mitigate problems, and prepare people for unavoidable difficulties by improving adaptability and resilience. It is a process concerned with human–environment interactions, and seeks to identify: what is environmentally desirable; what are physical, economic, social and technological constraints to achieving that process; and what are the most feasible options. Actually, there can be no concise universal definition of environmental management; however, it can be briefly summarized as supporting sustainable development; demanding multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary or even holistic approaches; it should integrate and reconcile different development viewpoints, co‐ordinate science, engineering, technology, social, policy making, and planning; state proactive processes; timescales and concerns ranging from local to global issues; and one stresses stewardship rather than exploitation while dealing with a world affected by humans.
In other perspectives, environmental management can be explained as methods of ways when dealing issues due to the importance of the need to improve environmental stewardship by integrating ecology, policy making, planning, and social development. The goals include sustaining and (if possible) improving existing resources; preventing and overcoming environmental problems; establishing limits; founding and nurturing institutions that effectively support environmental research, monitoring, and management resources; warning of threats and identifying positive change opportunities; (where possible) improving quality of life; and finally, identifying new technology or policies that are useful.
Chapter 2: The objective of this chapter is to introduce the genesis of world environmental problems and to provide an overview of the history behind present environmental laws and regulations of pollution in various countries and continents.
Engineers in all disciplines practice a profession that must obey rules governing their professional conduct and ethics. One important set of rules that all engineers should be aware of is environmental statues, which are laws enacted by US Congress and governments of other countries around the world.
Environmental law, also known as environmental and natural resources law, is a collective term describing the network of treaties, statutes, regulations, common, and customary laws addressing the effects of human activity on the natural environment. The core environmental law regimes address environmental pollution. A related but distinct set of regulatory regimes, now strongly influenced by environmental legal principles, focus on the management of specific natural resources, such as forests, minerals, or fisheries. Other areas, such as environmental impact assessment, may not fit neatly into either category but are important components of environmental law.
Chapter 3: This chapter provides a summary of industrial wastewater sources, wastewater characteristics, wastewater treatment, reuse and discharge, industrial sources of air pollutions, inventories, air pollution control, solid waste and hazardous waste characteristics, treatments, and management.
Industrial waste is the waste produced by industrial activity which includes any material that is rendered unusable during a manufacturing process such as that of factories, industries, mills, and mining operations. Mass manufacturing has existed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Some examples of industrial wastes are discussed including (but not limited to) chemical solvents, paints, sandpaper, paper products, industrial by‐products, metals, plastics, and radioactive wastes.
Toxic waste, chemical waste, industrial solid waste, and municipal solid waste are designations of industrial wastes. Sewage treatment plants can treat some industrial wastes, i.e. those consisting of conventional pollutants such as biochemical oxygen demand, COD, suspended solid, and total suspended solid. Industrial wastes containing toxic pollutants require specialized treatment systems.
Chapter 4: This chapter describes and deals with various important aspects of selecting the best remedial control technologies for pollutants, managing wastes, monitoring, sampling industrial water, air, and solid and hazardous materials, modes of sample collections, sample analyses by various analytical, physical–chemical methods approved by governmental agency, as required quality control and quality assurance, properly conducted laboratory auditing, testing, monitoring, permitting, report keeping, reporting, and compliance with local, state, and federal governments for discharging wastewater, emitting air, pollutants, and safely disposing of solid and hazardous materials.
Chapter 5: This chapter addresses risk assessment, which is an organized process used to describe and estimate the likelihood of adverse health and environmental impacts from exposures to chemicals released to air, water, and land. Risk assessment is also a systematic, analytical method used to determine the probability of adverse effects. A common application of risk assessment methods is to evaluate human health and ecological impacts of chemical releases into the environment. Information collected from environmental monitoring or modeling is incorporated into models of worker activity and exposure forms conclusion about the likelihood of adverse effects are formulated. As such, risk assessment is an important tool for making decisions with environmental and public health consequences, along with economic, societal, technological, and political consequences of proposed actions. This chapter addresses the assessment of risks to human health as well as ecological risks and, briefly, ecological risk management. In addition a major section is devoted to industrial and manufacturing process safety, federal and state occupational safety laws and regulations, and management occupational health.
Chapter 6: This chapter describes the wastes produced by industrial activities, which include materials that are rendered unusable during manufacturing processes such as that of factories, industries, mills, and mining operations. This wastefulness has existed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Some examples of industrial wastes and sources are chemicals and allied products, solvents, pigments, sludge, metals, ash, paints, furniture and fixtures, paper and allied products, plastics, rubber, leather, textile mill products, petroleum refining and related industries, electronic equipment and components, industrial by‐products, metals, radioactive wastes, miscellaneous manufacturing industries, and the list goes on. Hazardous or toxic wastes, chemical waste, industrial solid waste, and municipal solid waste are also designations of industrial wastes.
More than 12 billion T of industrial wastes are generated annually in the United States alone. This is roughly equivalent to more than 40 T of waste for every man, woman, and a child in the United States. The sheer magnitude of these numbers is cause for big environmental concern and drives us to identify the characteristics of the wastes, the various industrial operations that are generating the waste, the manner in which the waste are being managed, and the industrial pollution prevention policy and strategies. The first portion of this chapter is devoted to the pollution prevention hierarchy. Next there is an overview of how LCA tools can be applied to choose best available technologies (BACT) to minimize the waste at various stages of manufacturing processes of products. Finally, a few case studies on industrial competitive processes and products applying LCA tools are reviewed; and hence, also selections of BACT to demonstrate hierarch pollution prevention (P2) and environmental performance strategies.
Chapter 7: The role of economics in pollution prevention is of tantamount important, even as important as the ability to identify technologies changes to the process, new and emerging technologies, ZD technologies’, technologies for biobased engineered chemicals, products, renewable energy sources, and associated costs. This chapter shows some methods that can be used to assess the costs of implementing pollution prevention technologies and making cost comparisons to evaluate the cost‐effectiveness of various operations. The concept of best available control technologies is introduced and we analyze the costs and benefits of manufacturing biobased products. The topics treated illustrate that biobased new development can lead to sustainable economic progress and a healthier planet.
Sustainable development is about creating a business climate in which better goods and services are produced using less energy and materials with no or less waste and pollution. Natural steps and systems are a model for thinking about how to produce, consume, and live in sustainable cycles: nature produces little or no waste, relies on free and abundant energy from sun, and uses renewable resources. In this chapter, we focus on a framework that integrates environmental, social, and economic interests into effective chemical and allied business strategies.
Chapter 8: In this chapter our major focus is on lean manufacturing of various products while applying techniques and methodologies to achieve zero defects in products, and significantly eliminate waste and discharges to environment from the manufacturing process.
The quality of products, processes, and services has become a major decision factor in most industries and businesses today. Regardless of whether the consumer is an individual, a corporation, a military defense program, or a retail store, the consumer is making purchase decisions, he or she is likely to consider quality to be equal in importance to cost and schedule. Consequently, quality improvement has become a major concern to industries and businesses.
Quality means fitness for use with zero defects or zero effects in environmentally conscious manufacturing. For example, you or I may purchase automobiles that we expect to be free of manufacturing defects and that should provide reliable and economical transportation, a retailer buys finished goods with the expectation that they are properly packaged and arranged for easy storage and display, and a manufacturer buys raw material and expects to process it with no rework or scrap. In other words, all consumers expect that the products and services they buy will meet their requirements. These requirements define fitness for use.
Quality or fitness for use is determined through the interaction of quality of design and quality of conformance. Quality of design for environment and other aspects is defined by the different grades or levels of performance, reliability, serviceability, and function that are the result of deliberate engineering and environmental management decisions. By quality of conformance, we mean systematic reduction of variability and elimination of defects until every unit, batch, and product produced is identical in physical and chemical properties (zero defect and zero effect).
Chapter 9: The rate of industrial hazardous waste generation in the United States is approximately 750 million T/Y. Once these materials are designated as hazardous, the costs of managing, treating, storing, and disposing of them increase dramatically. This chapter describes some specific industrial waste minimization processes and technologies that have been successfully operating and provides other methodologies including industrial ecology, eco‐industrial park, manufacturing process intensification, and integration. The wastes (in air, water, or as solid) or by‐products generated during manufacturing process are recovered. The materials and energy recovered from waste streams either are reused in the plant or are sold to another plant as feedstock. It is possible in practice, as well as in theory, to isolate some industrial facilities almost completely from the environment by recycling all wastes into materials that can then be manufactured into consumer products. An example of such a facility is a coal‐fired power plant. An electron beam–ammonia conversion unit adds ammonia to the effluent gases, which then irradiates electronically, producing ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate that are sold as feedstock to fertilizer manufacturing; there is enhanced recovery of mercury from flue gas by adsorption and mercury recovery is complete. The details of these two processes are given as case studies later in Sections 9.2 and 9.4. Also, two separate case studies have been presented that highlight a profitable “waste‐to‐energy” recovery generating electricity and heat, and making chemicals and energy from gasification of black liquor as by‐products of pulping process.
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.”
Chapter 10: Engineers play an important role in global sustainable manufacturing and development by designing production systems for materials: minerals, chemicals, energy, water, electricity generation and distribution, transportation, buildings plus other structures, and consumer products. These designs have impact on the environment, economics, and societal benefits at scales that vary from local to global and temporal scales that vary from minutes to decades. As engineers create designs, they do not only evaluate their designs at multiple use and sustainability index (scale), they also embed their designs in complex systems.
The field of transportation provides an illustration of the multiple layers of systems in which engineers create designs. Among the most visible products designed by engineers are automobiles. Engineers design engines, and improvements to the design of a fossil fuel–powered engine for an automobile can increase fuel efficiency and reduce environmental impacts of emissions associated with burning fuels, while simultaneously reducing the cost of operating the vehicle. The size, power, and fuel efficiency of the engine must be balanced with the weight of the vehicle. The use of materials and fuels by automobiles are embedded in complex fuel and material supply systems. Developing systems to recycle the materials that make up the automobile at the end of its useful life might improve the environmental and economic performance of global materials flows. Use of alternative power sources, such as electricity or biofuels can impact flows of fuels, which, in turn, might impact global flows of materials such as water. Finally, the design of cities that reduce the need for personal transportation could dramatically reduce the environmental impacts of transportation systems and would also transform social structures.
In this chapter, sustainable design is very much emphasized and lays a foundation. Sustainable engineering is the design, commercialization, and use of processes and products that are feasible and economical while minimizing both the generation of pollution at the source and the risk to human health and the environment. The discipline embraces the concept that decisions to protect human health and the environment can have the greatest impact and cost effectiveness when applied early in the “design and development phase of a process or product.” Sustainable engineering transforms existing engineering disciplines and practices to those that promote sustainability. This new discipline incorporates the development and implementation of technologically and economically viable products, processes, and systems that promote human welfare while protecting human health and elevating the protection of the biosphere as a criterion in engineering solutions. To fully implement sustainable green engineering solutions, engineers use numerous principles and tools that are described in this chapter.
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