Alternative Economies

As will be evident from the above discussion many valuable chemicals can be made from renewable resources. In many cases current production methods fail to compete effectively with routes from fossil sources. With advances in biotechnology and increasing oil prices, renewable feedstocks will become more commercially attractive, especially for fine, speciality and pharmaceutical chemicals. If future bulk chemical production were to 

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Many cosmetics manufacturers have used the lower phthalates (diethyl phthalate, dimethyl and dibutyl phthalates) for many years as solvents and diluents in perfumes. On the whole, the cosmetic industry is able to innovate guickly because cosmetic products have a relatively short life cycle this provides short to medium-term opportunities to formulate out the problem ingredients in the next version of the product. Raw materials come at different costs and to reformulate-out chemicals of concern may result in a temporary increase in material cost. However, as more companies switch to alternatives, economies of scale are realised and the price will fall. ... 

Fuel cell technology is a very promising potential candidate to help replace the hydrocarbon economy with an alternative economy, perhaps based on hydrogen. A major advantage of the hydrogen economy is its similar structure to the hydrocarbon economy with its possible centralized layout. 

Each company has its own cutoff period for payout, depending on the economy, the company position, alternate projects, etc. One company used five years as the maximum payout acceptable for several years. As conditions changed, this w as reduced to three years, then one year. It was hai d to And projects with one year payout after taxes. 

It would obviously be desirable to eliminate the generation of waste. Practical alternatives are to minimize it by reduction at source or to recycle it. Table 16.7 illustrates the hierarchy of waste minimization practices. Source reduction includes increased process efficiency economies in the use of energy are also relevant, e.g. it may result in a decrease in the consumption of fossil fuels ... 

Alternatives to coal and hydrocarbon fuels as a source of power have been sought with increasing determination over the past three decades. One possibility is the Hydrogen Economy (p, 40), Another possibility, particularly for secondary, mobile sources of power, is the use of storage batteries. Indeed, electric vehicles were developed simultaneously with the first intemal-combustion-cngined vehicles, the first being made in 1888. In those days, over a century ago, electric vehicles were popular and sold well compared with the then noisy, inconvenient and rather unreliable peU ol-engined vehicles. In 1899 an electric car held the world land-speed record at 105 km per hour. In the early years of this century, taxis in New York, Boston and Berlin were mainly electric there were over 20000 electi ic vehicles in the USA and some 10000 cars and commercial vehicles in London. Even today (silent) battery-powered milk delivery vehicles are still operated in the UK. These use the traditional lead-sulfuric acid battery (p. 371), but this is extremely heavy and rather expensive. 

The natural-gas industries of Japan, Korea and Taiwan are based almost entirely on gas imported by tanker as liquified natural gas (LNG). These insular and peninsular economies produce almost no domestic natural gas, and until recent efforts to develop production on the Russian island of Sakhalin immediately north of Japan, import of natural gas by pipeline from nearby has not seemed a realistic alternative, In 1999, LNG imports provided about 12 percent of Japan s primary energy, 9 percent of South Korea s, and 6 percent of Taiwan s. In turn, these three countries together accounted for 79 percent of the world s international movements of LNG,... 

All the countries that produce nuclear waste have chosen the same alternative for the ultimate disposition of HLW, deep geological isolation, and they did so indepeiideiitly of one another. The United States has the most radioactive nuclear waste and the most complicated array of waste types of any nuclear country. Only in the United States can one find the same economy of scale for waste handling. Thus, it leads the world in most activities aimed at safe isolation. Ill France, Japan, and Great Britain, however, reprocessing is routinely practiced. Those countries reprocess HLW for many other countries. As mentioned above, reprocessing is not currently allowed in the United States. 

Solar energy offers a clean, sustainable alternative to continued use of fossil fuels. In its various forms it is already providing useful amounts of energy on a global basis, and will provide steadily increasing amounts in the twenty-first century, especially as developing countries require more energy to improve their economies. 

The drive of financial economy has been manifest in terms of the need to establish alternative coating systems for particular applications based not on... 

It is usually presumed that smooth muscle cells have only one kind of activity, contraction, and that the only alternative to contractile activity is a kind of estivating resting state (Figure 11). The actual situation is of course more complicated. For example, smooth muscles synthesize extracellular filament protein. They also proliferate, particularly in the cardiovascular system. Both of these processes require a considerable amount of control of the cellular economy. 

Give an example of an SnI and an 8 2 reaction, explaining the mechanism and calculating the atom economy of the reaction. Suggest alternative synthetic routes to your products that are more atom economic. 

Other than energy considerations, on which there is little comparative data, the most important green role for photochemistry is in improving atom economy. Although only a preliminary research result, an excellent example of this is the avoidance of the need for stoichiometric amounts of Lewis acid catalysts in the synthesis of some acylated aromatic compounds. Benzoquinone can be reacted with an aldehyde under a sunlamp to yield an acylhydroquinone in up to 88% yield. The alternative procedure would involve reaction of an acyl chloride with hydroquinone and a... 

Mass balancing unifies all metrics such as yield, atom economy, TON, TOF, and so on. Therefore, the application of mass indices and environmental factors presents itself as an integrating solution with moderate data demands. A fair comparison of alternative... 

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