Source reduction, packaging applications

If the purpose is the conservation of the non-renewable resources, first our efforts should be concentrated on the reduction of the amount of plastics materials in each application, i.e. source reduction. The benefits of source reduction are obvious, since it results directly in less environmental damage. Indeed this option has been undertaken in recent years by the users of packaging materials, because it makes economic sense. For example, the thickness of film packaging materials today is much smaller than it was a decade ago. Excessive wrapping should be avoided. Secondly we have to re-use the same products if at all possible. The culture of completely discarding the products after use must be changed. The minimisation of the amount of plastics in circulation is more directly beneficial than is recycling. 

CARM is a software package developed by Prof. J.-Y. Chen of UC, Berkeley, that automatically creates reduced chemical kinetic mechanisms starting with a detailed mechanism and a set of input problems representing the conditions under which the mechanism is to be used (Reaction-Engineering-Intemational 2014). CARM is an acronym of Computer Assisted Reduction Method . The output of CARM is a Fortran subroutine that gives the chemical source terms for each species in the reduced mechanism as a function of the temperature, pressure and species mass fractions. This subroutine can be used in a CFD code or in simpler applications such as those associated with the CHEMKIN package. Application of CARM was reported by Sung et al. (2001). 

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