(59b) Sustainability Principles in Practice: a Systematic Approach

The 21st century inherits stark challenges for human society, which are particularly tough for chemical engineering. While on one hand, chemical engineering is responsible for providing most of the products of daily consumption, the base for modern agriculture as well as energy carriers for power generation, transport, heating and cooling, on the other hand, it has a considerable impact on the environment, via its resource consumption, its emissions and the impact of its products. New (sustainable) alternatives, for example, change of raw material base, use of renewable resources, efficient manufacture of chemical products and sustainable products and processes that can efficiently manufacture them, will need to be considered to meet the current and future challenges. Some of the important issues in this respect are how to generate/identify sustainable alternatives, how to analyze them, which criteria should be used to evaluate them, and how to implement them?

The objective of this presentation is to highlight the use of systematic multidisciplinary approaches for generation of sustainable alternatives combined with methods/tools for analysis and evaluation. For generation of alternatives, driving force based methods for product-process synthesis and design, employing green chemistry principles will be discussed. For analysis, application of life cycle assessment techniques will be highlighted. For evaluation, the use of sustainability metrics combined with safety and hazards indicators will be illustrated. Examples in the form of case studies from the energy sector, pharmaceuticals sector and chemicals/food sectors will be used in the illustrations.