(93d) Teaching the Concepts of Life Cycle Assessment Through the Evaluation of Pharmaceutical Syntheses

The concepts of green engineering and life cycle assessment can be integrated into the curriculum using a drug manufacturing example.  The pharmaceutical industry has one of the highest waste generation rates per pound of product produced and the highest amount of organic solvents used per pound of product produced for any commercial sector.  The solvents result in wastes released into the environment through the drug manufacturing process and throughout the life cycle of the solvent.  Students can easily evaluate chemical use and waste reduction that result from new drug synthesis routes, but few understand how these new processing routes impact the overall life cycle emissions from cradle to grave.  This paper describes our efforts to educate students in life cycle thinking in making green design decisions in chemical syntheses.

A case study in drug manufacture is used to illustrate how a sustainability analysis is performed to select the design with the lower overall carbon footprint.  A tutorial was developed to show how a life cycle assessment is performed in a process and the key issues such as defining the boundaries of the system and calculating the appropriate life cycle inventory data for all chemicals involved in the analysis.  The case study can be used in a condensed version for lower level instruction or expanded for upper level process design classes.  Students see how changes made in manufacturing lead to environmental impacts well beyond the production plant and define the true carbon footprint of a manufacturing operation.

This project is sponsored by the NSF Engineering Research Center on Structured Organic Particulate Systems.