Resource mass productivity

Compared with the Leclanche batteries, alkaline manganese dioxide batteries offer better performance at high discharge currents and lower temperatures and a better shelf life. They are more expensive than Leclanche batteries, but their cost per unit of energy is competitive and resources of raw materials are sufficient for mass production of these batteries. 

Commodities are mass products produced and sold in high volumes with standardized quality and few variants. Primary commodities such as natural resources can be defined as materials in their natural state (Baker 1992) produced in large volumes and available from many sources (Champion/Feame 2000). 

In the following, the basic principle of the flexible recipes is presented. To keep the explanations simple, we consider only one single type of end product that is produced from one single raw material on one resource at a specific location during a given period. Required are the maximum process throughput of the resource measured in tons of output per hour and the input of raw material and output of finished products, respectively. In many types of chemical mass production, raw material consumption depends on the utilization rate of the equipment employed. Hence, linear recipe functions can be derived, which indicate the input of raw material required to produce the desired amount of output. 

Considerable research effort Is being placed Into the development of renewable resources. Although steady progress is being made in areas such as photovoltaics, there are numerous discoveries yet to be made. At this time, the cost of producing electricity via electrolysis of water using photovoltaics is about 0.12/kWh. In order to be competitive, this cost must be reduced substantially via improved efficiency of the overall system and reduced cost resulting from mass production. 

Designing efficient processes that minimize the resources (mass and energy) needed to produce the desired product... 

Numerous case studies, examples, and problems illustrate the thermodynamic analysis of process performance to explain how to effectively analyze and optimize work flows and environmental resources. The authors compare the present industrial society with an emerging one in which mass production and consumption are in harmony with the natural environment through closure of material cycles. In this second edition, the book s structure of Basics, Thermodynamic Analysis of Processes, Case Studies, and Sustainability has been unaffected, but a few additions have been made. 

Plant tissue culture technique is one of the promising tools to ensure sustainable use of plant resources. There are three main strategies used in the biotechnological application of medicinal plants. The first is micropropagation for mass production of nurseries, the second is synthetic/artificial production of secondary metabolites of medicinal value and the third is molecular breeding for crop improvement. 

For mass production of hydrogen, tlie most cost-effective and widely used process is currently the reforming of natural gas by water vapour. A production method using nuclear power, by high-temperature electrolysis or themiochemical cycles, would meet the requirements of sustainable development, both in resources and in polluting gas emissions. The technical feasibility of these solutions remains to be demonstrated, as does their economic feasibility. 

There are more indicators (e.g., mass intensity, MI, and mass productivity) that belong to this general class of resource intensity indicators, for example, which quantify greermess of chemical processes and products in terms of effectiveness of mass and energy intensity. 

Mass productivity has been found to be a useful metric for business leaders since it highlights resource utilization, and it is more focused on efficiency rather than waste. This is illustrated in Table 2.3, where the average atom economy is compared with the average mass productivity for 38 drug manufacturing... 

The term lean production was introduced by Krafcik (1988) and the famous book. The Machine That Changed the World (Womack et al. 1990). These publications present the results of a major MIT study to identify systematically best practices of Japanese and other automobile manufacturers worldwide. Lean production is lean in that it uses half of the various production resources (labor, manufacturing space, tool investment, engineering hours, inventory, etc.) used in the Ford-style mass production that was prevalent into the 1980s. 

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