Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1
The Biorefinery Concept:
An Integrated Approach
James Clark 1 and Fabien Deswarte 2
1 Department of Chemistry, Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence, University of York, UK
2 The Biorenewables Development Centre, The Biocentre, York Science Park, UK
1.1 Sustainability for the Twenty-First Century
The greatest challenge we face in the twenty-first century is to reconcile our
desires as a society to live lives based on consumption of a wider range of articles
both essential (e.g. food) and luxury (e.g. mobile phones) with the fact that we live
on a single planet with limited resources (to make the articles) and limited capac-
ity to absorb our wastes (spent articles). While some will argue that we should not
be limited by our own planet and instead seek to exploit extra-terrestrial resources
(e.g. mining the asteroids), most of us believe it makes more sense to match our
lifestyles with the planet we live on.
We can express this in the form of an equation whereby the Earth's capacity
(EC) is defined as the product of world population P , the economic activity of an
individual C and a conversion factor between activity and environmental burden B :
EC = P × C × B.
Since we live in a time of growing P and C (through the rapid economic develop-
ment of the mega-states of the East in particular), and if we assume that all the
indicators of environmental stress (including climate change, full landfill sites,
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