Ecosolvents

The assessment of a solvent s environmental impact should consider not only impacts arising from its industrial production, recycling, and disposal, but also its ESH (environmental, safety, and health) characteristics. This kind of thinking has led to the idea of a green solvent or ecosolvent.22,31-33... 

One functional unit was defined as the use of 1 kg of solvent as a reaction medium in a chemical production process. To calculate the environmental impact of specific solvents, the Ecosolvent-Tool31 was used, which combines the LCIs of 45 petrochemical products. 

Capello, C., S. Hellweg, C. Seyler, and K. Hungerbiihler. 2005. Ecosolvent A tool for waste-solvent management in the chemical industry. 27th LCA Discussion Forum (17th November). Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. 

Inkjet is a commercially driven endeavor, and as such it is often difficult to disentangle the marketing hype from the substance. There are numerous inkjet inks of types described by names meant to indicate that they are healthier to use or have a more benign impact on the environment. Ecosolvents, soft solvents, mild solvents and... 

Fischer and co-workers undertook a LCA of the 26 organic solvents which they had already assessed in terms of EHS criteria (see above).They used the Eco-solvent software tool (http //www.sust-chem.ethz.ch/tools/ecosolvent/), which on the basis of industrial data considers the birth of the solvent (its petrochemical production) and its death by either a distillation process or treatment in a hazardous waste incineration plant. For both types of end-of-life treatment, environmental credits were granted where appropriate, e.g. solvent recovery and reuse upon distillation. The results of this assessment are shown in Figure 1.2. From an LCA perspective, tetrahydrofuran (THF), butyl acetate, cyclohexanone and 1-propanol are not good solvents. This is primarily due to the environmental... 

HC-DCF Low Flash Dry Cleaning Solvent Orfom SX 18 Soltrol 100 68551-17-7 CIO-13 isoparaffin EcoSolv Dry Cleaning Fluid Soltrol 130 68551-19-9 C12-14 isoparaffin Orfom SX 10 Soltrol 170 68551-20-2 Cl 3-16 isoparaffin Cl 3-17 isoparaffin Orfom SX 11 Soltrol 220 Soltrol 300... 

The other uses the Ecosolvent tool (Capello et al., 2006) to consider the cumulative energy demand (CED) over a substance s whole life cycle. Three figures are arrived at. The first is the CED for its production, reported in megajoules per kilogram of solvent. The net CED after recovery by distillation is calculated assuming 90% recovery, as 10% of the CED for production plus the energy consumed by the distillation of the other 90%. The net CED after incineration is that for production less the energy that may be recovered by efficient incineration. A few examples are listed in Table 8.1. 

Anonymous. Available at http//www.sust-chem.ethz.ch/tools/ecosolvent. Accessed February 11, 2015. 

Capello C, Hellweg S, Hungerbiihler J. The Ecosolvent Tool. Zurich ETH Zurich, Safety Environmental Technology Group 2006. 

Capello and co-workers have also proposed a comprehensive framework for the environmental assessment of solvents (both single and mixture) [27]. The tool combines EHS analysis of potential solvent hazards with LCA results for environmental impact in a simple three-step procedure. First, a solvent is scored using the EHS method for nine effect categories. These include the potential for release, acute toxicity, chronic toxicity, fire/explosion and reaction/decomposition, persistency, and air and water hazard. The second step involves application of LCA, as described above using the software tool Ecosolvent to calculate the impact scores for the solvent. Finally, the two assessment scores are combined and used to rate the solvents. 

---