2004 Chemical Industry Sustainability development based

Quill was founded in April 1999 as an industrial consortium, with members from all sectors of the chemical industry. It is based on the well-proven industry/uni-versity cooperative research center (lUCRC) concept developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation and is only the second lUCRC in Europe. There were 17 founding industrial members of the Quill consortium, and the current membership includes (listed alphabetically) bp. Chevron, Cytec, DuPont, Eastman Chemicals, ICI, Invista, Merck, Novartis, Procter and Gamble, SACHEM, SASOL, Shell, Strata, and UOP. Research carried out between QUB and individual companies, or by QUILL itself, has generated more than 20 patent applications, many of which have now been published, from as diverse a range of industries as BNFL, BP Chemicals, Cytec, ICI, Quest International, and Uni-chema Chemie BV. In a recent report in Nature, the need for collaboration between government, industry, and academic institutions to form sustainable chemistry centers was stressed as vital in order to rethink traditional chemistry processes to be not only beneficial to the environment but also to make economic sense for industry. Quill, under the codirection of Professors Kenneth R. Seddon and Jim Swindall OBE, is one of these chemistry centers, and is the first (and... 

On the one hand, the current petrochemical route would continue to provide the world with the chemicals consumers require. To satisfy the need for a more sustainable development, the petrochemical industry would continue its drive toward a continuous improvement in energy efficiency (see Figure 10.3). This drive will primarily include the continuous improvement of the current crude-oil-based processes while stranded methane or CO2 would be utilized as complementary feedstock. 

It is clear that there are many possibilities for avoiding the use of classical acid and base catalysts in a wide variety of chemical reactions. Their application will result in the development of more sustainable processes with a substantial reduction in the inorganic waste produced by the chemical industry. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the use of chemically modified expanded com starches, containing pendant S03H or NH2 groups, as solid acid or base catalysts, respectively [152]. In addition to being recyclable these catalysts are biodegradable and derived from renewable raw materials (see Chapter 8). 

Sustainable development, responsible care, and process-integrated protection of the environment are the guidelines of chemistry and the chemical industry in the new millennium. A high percentage of industrial processes are based on the catalytic transformation of substrates. The main focus of industrial research is the further development of transformation processes toward sustainability, and the use of renewable resources as substrates. 

For more than 50 years, industrial chemistry has been based on coal, oil, and gas. Hence renewable resources have become less important, but shortage of resources, the greenhouse effect, growth of the world population, and the pursuit of sustainable development have awoken great interest in the energetic and substantial use of renewable resources in industry and research. A lower dependence on crude oil imports and raw material costs is currently accelerating the shift towards chemical products derived from renewable biological feedstocks. 

Chemical Abstracts Service One major source of scientific and technical information for the chemical industry is Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) of Columbus, Ohio. CAS is a self-sustaining division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and monitors new developments published in the world s chemical literature. In a recent five year period, CAS monitored over 15,000 journals, periodicals, conferences and technical reports gathered from over 150 nations and published in over 50 languages. CAS also monitors the patents from 26 major countries of the world for new chemical developments. CAS reviews this literature for new information published related to chemical engineering and over 75 different fields of chemistry. Each week for the past 74 years CAS has published the abstracts or summaries pertaining to the new developments cited in the world s chemical literature. On the average, over 500,000 citations are being added to the CAS information base each year. 

There is a general concern in developing new chemistry that can eventually be sustainable and benign for the environment [82, 83]. Most of the current chemical industry is based on the use of oil and natural gas as feedstock and this situation... 

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