Category: Why Industrial Environmental Management?

A critical element of an interim strategy is enhanced recovery. This can be approached from two directions: reuse of products and recycling of materials. Reuse of products includes return, reconditioning, and remanufacturing. The energy required for reuse and recycling is one of the key factors determining recoverability of a product. The closer the recovered product…

The shift toward a ZD culture, especially in a world dominated by industrial ecology, will see the development of new products, services, and industries. Our global economic system depends on extracting massive quantities of materials from the environment – after extraction and processing, the “annual accumulation of active materials embodied in durables, after some allowance for discard…

So‐called designer wastes can serve as direct feedstock to another sector, or, if properly processed through a conversion technology, as processed feedstock. If the beer industry for example, used a sugar‐based cleanser instead of a caustic cleanser for its bottle‐washing process, the discharge water could serve as a direct feed to fish ponds, without needing…

In sectors that cannot achieve Zero Emissions unilaterally, it may be necessary to build industrial clusters. The input–output analysis leads directly into development of clusters of industries that can use each other’s outputs. Developing effective clusters calls for executives look beyond single industries and make innovative connections among seemingly unrelated potential partners in new industrial clusters. Companies…

Over the last few years, the members of zero discharge communities and industries have developed a five‐step methodology for implementing Zero Emissions. Pauli’s Breakthroughs (1996) provides a far more comprehensive approach that extends well beyond the manufacturing site. The summary provided here emphasizes the use and impact of a ZD approach at the manufacturing level. Analyze Throughput The first…

Chemical process and product design engineers, environmental engineers, and consulting engineering firms can play a pivotal role as industries move toward the Zero Emissions or Zero Discharge paradigm, especially firms whose traditional niche has been to treat waste so that it is benign and acceptable for discharge. The role for these engineers in the twenty‐first century is to transform…

To understand why Zero Discharge is a critical component of sustainability, it is important to recognize that one principle of sustainability is the efficient and wise use of resources, especially with regard to limiting the amount and type of resource extraction and subsequent pollution loadings. To see how these are related, it may help to think of…

The concept of Zero Discharge or Zero Emissions is the key to sustainable development but is by itself a subset of industrial ecology (also see Section 9.2) (see Figure 1.3). Sustainability can be defined as follows: “Sustainable development” is the challenge of meeting human needs for natural resources, industrial products, energy, food, transportation, shelter, and effective waste management while…

While there are several practical definitions of zero effect or zero discharge (ZD) manufacturing, a ZD system is most commonly understood to be one that discharges no waste from a processing and manufacturing site. In such a manufacturing facility (see Figure 1.2) an absolute minimum amount of waste, “ideally zero,” is generated and leaves the plant. The only…

No defect and zero effect, or something very close to it, is the ultimate goal of P3, while the processes themselves are the tools and pathways to achieve it. Thus, industries were to be reorganized into “clusters” in which the wastes or by‐products of each industrial process’ were fully matched with others industries’ input requirements;…