Conclusions and Path Forward

1 Conclusions. Survey results, the focus group discussions, and the authors experience suggest several conclusions with regard to sustainability and the chemical industry. 

The ACC s expanded RCMS will be a useful tool in pursuing sustainability, although it is not a panacea. Top-level commitment, clear vision of company mission, risk assessment, control activities, information and communications, and monitoring is essential. It is important to gain a thorough understanding of how RCMS supports sustainability - and how it does not. 

With the need for so many functional groups to be involved in the effective management of sustainability programs, coordination and communication within the company is the key to success. Mistakes and failures are inevitable, yet the leaders will persevere and will realize performance improvement and bottom-line benefits. Companies will eventually view sustainability as an integrated business process, and will clarify roles and responsibilities for functional groups. They will roll out more systematic programs, develop monitoring activities, and periodically re-think their approach. 

As sustainability continues to grow in importance for the chemical industry, it will become increasingly important to measure the true costs and benefits. Frameworks now in their nascent stages will evolve to help companies focus on areas of greatest importance. 

As a collaborative activity, the chemical industry should look to develop a common framework or standard for sustainability reporting and responding to stakeholder inquiries. As part of this effort, the industry should continue to monitor other emerging external reporting frameworks, such as the Global Reporting Initiative, One Report , and the Corporate Responsibility Exchange, which all seek to standardize reported information and may be helpful to both the industry and its stakeholders. 

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Prepare investigation report containing all results, evaluations, conclusions, and path forward. 

Taking the above conclusions into consideration, following key steps would form the path forward as far as the role of surfactants for paints, inks, and polishes is considered ... 

When the addition and elimination reactions are mechanically reversible, they proceed by identical mechanistic paths but in opposite directions. In these circumstances, mechanistic conclusions about the addition reaction are applicable to the elimination reaction and vice versa. The principle of microscopic reversibility states that the mechanism (pathway) traversed in a reversible reaction is the same in the reverse as in the forward direction. Thus, if an addition-elimination system proceeds by a reversible mechanism, the intermediates and transition states involved in the addition process are the same as... 

Marcus and Rice6 made a more detailed analysis of the recombination from the point of view of the reverse reaction, the unimolecular decomposition of ethane, C2Ha - 2CH3. By the principle of microscopic reversibility the transition states must be the same for forward and reverse paths. Although they reached no definite conclusion they pointed out that a very efficient recombination of CH3 radicals would imply a very high Arrhenius A factor for the unimolecular rate constant of the C2H6 decomposition which in turn would be compatible only with a very "loose transition state. Conversely, a very low recombination efficiency would imply a very tight structure for the transition state and a low A factor for the unimolecular decomposition. 

In conclusion, the distance between the two slits can be calculated and compared to the test-bed measurement. In this case, as shown in Fig. 3.10, comparing the optical path difference from the Zemax modelling and the optical path difference from the forward data modelling as a function of the baseline gives us a slit distance of 5.7 mm. The distance measured on the source is 5.5 mm, which means a difference of 3.5 %. 

This technique promises to be a unique tool for determining an essential detail of chemical reactions - the geometries of their transition states. It remains to be seen how this approach, critically dependent on the special hydrophobic effect in water solution, can be apphed generally to such questions. It should be added that the conclusions we have reached so far are consistent with detailed quantum mechanical calculations that are also reported in the papers. Thus these experimental approaches can be used to test and vahdate theoretical conclusions. We can look forward to a future in which the detailed paths of chemical reactions are calculated with theoretical methods and validated by techniques such as the one developed in our work. 

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