Sustainable process systems sustainability assessment

The starting point in the development and designing of a closed water loop system is an inventory of the amounts and the quality of the process and transport water flows which are needed for the various steps in the production process. Each production step where process or transport water is involved causes a certain amount of wastewater. The pollution of this water is strongly dependent on the process step. The selection of separate treatment steps which, together, comprise a closed loop water system is complex. As already mentioned, various complete treatment scenarios can be developed and designed to satisfy the requirements set for process and transport water and treatment of wastewater. A technical and economic evaluation, in combination with environmental sustainability assessment, is necessary to determine the treatment system which is most appropriate. 

Since life cycle assessment (LCA) can be more than an environmental impact assessment approach, chapter Life Cycle Sustainabiftty Assessment A Holistic Evaluation of Social, Economic, and Environmental Impacts discusses life cycle sustainabiftty assessment. This extends the holistic environmental LCA to account for the economic and social pillars of sustainabiftty. Lastly, chapter Embedding Sustainabiftty in Product and Process Development—The Role of Process Systems Engineers describes the practical role of process systems engineers in the implementation of sustainabiftty in product and process development. It shows some key aspects and tools that practitioners should take into account to design and develop more sustainable products and processes during material selection, process design, process and product modeling, and supply chain implications. 

For the social criteria, two methods are applied in this study. A more detailed safety-related discussion of the bioethanol process can be found in the open Hterature [45]. In the first method, safety during operation, operability of the plant, safe startup and shutdown, and location-specific demands are selected as four soft indicators for sustainability assessment. The evaluation and justification of each indicator are provided in Table 6.13, where standard definition and scaling system can be found in Othman et al. [1]. In this approach, the process with the higher score is more desirable. Again the dry grind process is found to be superior. 

Sustainability Assessment and Performance Improvement of Electroplating Process Systems... 

Both systems are assessed from cradle to gate on three aspects of sustainability (Fig. 14.2) and for specific boundaries for reference and prospective systems (Figs. 14.3 and 14.4). The system boundaries are slightly different for three piUars of sustainabihty. For the environmental impacts, the study excludes impacts from the production of capital goods, which are typical to any previous LCA studies conducted because of its added complexity when coUecting data. Nevertheless, the economic and social impacts are assessed on an economy-wide scale, which includes aU sectors directly or indirectly related to the electricity generation process. 

Chapter Modeling and Advanced Control for Sustainable Process Systems starts with the inclusion of sustainability in process systems engineering by integrating process control with sustainability assessment tools for the simultaneous evaluation and optimization of process operations. The sustainability evaluation results provide information on whether the implementation of control systems is moving process performance toward a more sustainable operation. 

Assessments of the sustainability of processes and systems, and efforts to improve sustainability, should be based in part upon thermodynamic principles, and especially the insights revealed through exergy analysis. 

The aim of the assessment of the effects of agricultural products on the environment is to evaluate their impact on environment sustainability [24], especially in terms of food consumption patterns [25]. As stated by [26], the system sustainability can be evaluated on the basis of inputs and outputs and their conversion to C02e. [27] states that the measurement of GHG emissions suffers from certain inaccuracy. The reason for this error is that emissions in agriculture are influenced by complex biological processes with a wide range of variables. 

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