A Proposed Methodological Considerations for Sustainable Chemical Process Design

Abstract

Chemical manufacture is a significant value-added industry in both local and global economies. Along with highly relevant issues such as unsustainable process design, energy consumption, and waste generation linked with the sector, societal issues relating to chemical product health and safety are part of the greater sustainability concerns. There is a need to design a sustainable strategy while ensuring economic stability at the corporate level. Hence, this paper presents a methodological proposal of integrated modelling approach for sustainable chemical process design at early design process. The step of achieving this objective is separated into several parts. The first step is to classify parameters from established tools as a benchmark for sustainability metrics. The next step is to transform quantification value of triple bottom line impact (economic, environment and social) to normalized weightage by using Multi Criteria Analysis. The final stage is to develop alternative in terms of technical optimization of process design. The implementation multimodal Multi Criteria Analysis and optimized process design exhibits significant improvements in sustainability impacts according to the waste reduction (WAR) algorithm.