Introduction

In the United States, roughly 12 billion T of nonhazardous waste is generated and disposed of by the US industries. That amount is about is over 200 lb of industrial waste per person per day. The largest industrial contributors to nonhazardous waste are manufacturing industries (~7600 million T/Y), oil and gas production (2100–3600 million T/Y), and the mining industry (>1400 million T/Y). Contributors of lower amounts are electricity generators (fly ash and flue‐gas desulfurization waste), construction waste, hospital infectious waste, and waste tires. The rate of industrial hazardous waste generation in the United States is approximately 750 million T/Y (Allen and Shonnard 2012; Allen and Rosselot 1997). Once these materials are designated as hazardous, the costs of managing, treating, storing, and disposing of it 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 (EIP), 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 in practice, as well as in theory, possible 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 is then irradiated electronically, producing ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate that are sold as feedstock to fertilizer manufacturing; enhanced recovery of mercury from flue gas by adsorption and mercury recovery from a coal‐fired plant. The details of these two processes are given as case studies later in this chapter. Also, two separate case studies have been presented that highlight a profitable industrial “by‐product‐to‐energy” recovery generating electricity and heat, and making chemicals and energy from gasification of black liquor, as by‐product 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.”