Quantitative Method For Environmental Impact Factors In Environmental Benign Chemical Process Integration

At present, one vital task of chemical process design with sustainability considerations is to maintain the critical balance between a healthy economic growth and a healthy environment. Chemical industries play a key role of environmental problem associating with energy consumption, natural resources depletion, and environmental potential impacts with the releases. It has become a virtual obstacle to industrial sustainability. Nowadays, it is widely recognized that process design reflecting an integrated perspective across all the environmental concerns will lead to significant environmental improvement.Environmental impact minimization through process design is a developing research in chemical industry. Not only for environmental protection, but also for process technology in itself, it is an urgent task to integrate environmental impact minimization into chemical process integration. In this paper, we tried to summarize the developments of thisarea in recent years. Environmental impact assessment and process integration are highlighted for environmental impact minimization. There is still a long way to go for the development of environmental performance indicators and indices.In order to carry out the assessment easily, a procedure should be established. This paper provided a procedure which includes six steps: identify system boundary , classification of environmental impact category, characterization, normalization, calculation of weight, and total assessment.Environmental impact factors consist of ten sub-criteria including energy consumption, global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, smog formation, human toxicity, aquatic toxicity, terrestrial toxicity, Nutrient Enrichment and dust. Due to the lack and uncertainty of environmental information, both quantitative and qualitative aspects have to be considered simultaneously. In this paper, a hierarchical framework was used to help consider the environmental performance of process. Analytic Hierarchy Process was helpful to determine the relevant importance of different criteria or attributes.A chemical process assessment of environmental impact index, Chemical Green Index, was proposed. It is a method for determining the potential environmental impact of a process. The method defines ten environmental impact factors to characterize the generation of potential...