Handbook of Environmental Engineering

23Waste Reduction and Pollution Prevention for the Chemicals Industry: Methodologies, Economics, and Multiscale Modeling Approaches

Cheng Seong Khor^1,*, Chandra Mouli R. Madhuranthakam², and Ali Elkamel^3,4

¹Chemical Engineering Department, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Seri Iskandar, Perak Darul Ridzuan, Malaysia

²Chemical Engineering Department, Abu Dhabi University, Abu Dhabi, UAE

³Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

⁴Department of Chemical Engineering, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE

The paradigm of green engineering that advocates environmentally conscious practices and operations has emerged as the perennial driving force of the industrial sector of the global economy. This chapter aims at providing an integrated treatment of objectives and methods for identifying and implementing waste reduction and pollution prevention (P2) initiatives in the chemical industry. We consolidate a set of tools, techniques, and best practices that would ensure the successful development of an economically sustainable P2 program with a multiscale survey and categorization of these available approaches at the levels of macro‐, meso‐, and microscale.

23.1 Introduction

This chapter provides a survey treatment on the subject of waste reduction programs and practices in chemical plant operations, extended to include the wider scope defined by the term pollution prevention (P2). (A discussion on the definition of ...