Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Maximize Mass-, Space- and Time-Efficiency
- Processes and systems should be designed to maximize
mass-, space-, and time-efficiency. If a system is designed for, used, or applied at less than maximum
efficiency, resources are being wasted throughout the lifecycle.
Conserve Complexity
- The choices and complexity of the design must take into account recycling, reuse, or
beneficial disposition across all design scales.
Meet the Need, Minimize the Excess
- Minimize the use of underutilized and unnecessary materials to
increase efficiency and conserve energy technologies that target the specific needs and demands of end
users provide alternatives to devising solutions for extreme or unrealistic conditions.
Integrate Local Material and Energy Flows
- Products, processes and systems must integrate and interconnect
with available energy and material flows. By taking advantage of existing energy and material flows, the
need to generate energy and/or acquire and process raw materials is minimized. This strategy can be
employed in processes to use heat generated by exothermic reactions to drive other reactions with high
activation energies.
Design for a commercial 'afterlife'
- Design decisions on the end-of-life of a product should be based on the
material and energy invested. The instrumentation used in analytical chemistry could be recycled. This
would extend the life cycle of an analytical instrument. To reduce waste, components that remain functional
and valuable could be recovered for reuse and/or reconfiguration. The design of next-generation products,
processes and systems must take into account the reuse of the valuable properties of recovered components.
The US Environmental Protection Agency EPA has enunciated a similar policy: green engineering is the
design, commercialization, and use of processes and products that are feasible and economical while
minimizing; (1) the generation of pollution at the source and (2) the risk to human health and the environment.
Green engineering embraces the concept that decisions to protect human health and the environment can have
the greatest impact and be most cost-effective if they are applied at the outset to the design and development
of a process or product [3].
Strategies to decrease the use of energy in laboratories are now common and the principles outlined above
are shaping the trends in analytical chemistry and analytical laboratories.
There are at least three options for development:
1.
The practical approach: conserving or reducing use (short- to medium-term);
2.
The administrative approach: education and training (medium-term);
3.
The benign technologies approach: substituting critical components (long-term).
The traditional short- to medium-term approach to reducing the consumption of energy in a process is
minimizing and prevention of waste. This can yield substantial savings and can be viewed as a way to buy time
while developing more sustainable approaches. However, if a sizeable investment has been made in a particular
solution, for example, advanced thermal oven, this technology has a tendency to persist even if the situation
has changed, the technology has advanced, or it is no longer an adequate solution to a particular problem.
Some progress has been made with regard to medium-term strategies and savings in laboratories, such as the
computerized control of lab buildings. However, many of these improvements are only fully effective if the
people working in the labs - the ' end- users' - are involved in the energy saving efforts. There are ways that the
laboratory energy consumer can reduce the overall consumption of energy in the lab and this can be achieved
by means of intensive education programs and practical training. It is a significant task for laboratory managers
to educate lab researchers in the ways they can save energy, and to involve them in reducing energy consumption.
The third and long-term approach is the objective of green chemistry - that chemistry itself would generate
no waste and become more effective in its use of energy. The key to sustainability is to design chemical
processes, equipment and instruments that produce a minimum amount of waste and use energy only at the
