Assessing Safety, Health, and Environmental Impact Early during Process Development

Abstract

During chemical process development, potential safety, health, and environmental (SHE) hazards must be identified, analyzed, and managed as early as possible to avoid negative consequences (higher risks, higher costs, longer development times). The main problem of early SHE assessment is the lack of substance data and process information, especially when batch processes are considered. A new method is presented that closes this gap considerably. SHE aspects are assessed in 11 effect categories. For each substance of a given chemical process and each effect category, the most reliable data are selected out of a variety of different substance databases or estimation methods. After identifying SHE problems as dangerous properties, their magnitude is analyzed as potential of danger and can be reduced by technological measures. In this paper, first the goal and scope of the method is outlined. Then the detailed definitions of all categories as well as the exact way of combining information is presented and discussed with respect to current practices in risk analysis and environmental assessment. Finally the method is applied to a case study from pharmaceutical industry. Major SHE hazards of the process are identified and discussed.

Safety, health, and environmental assessment of bioethanol production from sugarcane, corn, and corn stover

“…In the original EHS framework of Koller et al [23], a set of dangerous properties (mobility, fire/explosion, reaction/ decomposition, acute toxicity, irritation, chronic toxicity, air-mediated effects, water-mediated effects, solid waste, degradation, and accumulation) is defined depicting the EHS hazards. Scaling schemes are proposed, which quantify these dangerous properties for all substances involved in a process and result in substance-specific indices with values between 0 and 1.…”

“…Scaling schemes are proposed, which quantify these dangerous properties for all substances involved in a process and result in substance-specific indices with values between 0 and 1. Sugiyama et al [25] have extended the work of Koller et al [23] by combining the substance-specific indices with the respective process mass flows and introducing a weighting scheme for calculating first categorical scores for the EHS hazards and finally an overall EHS hazard assessment score. Both substance-specific indices and process mass flows can result from basic information about the process layout and operating conditions complemented with process modeling, wherever is necessary.…”

“…The bioethanol production from these resources has been well studied and documented in literature with respect to mass and energy balances and available technologies, providing the necessary information for the hazard assessment methods. Two hazard assessment methods were applied: the inherent safety index (ISI) [22] method and the environmental, health, and safety (EHS) method [23]. These methods have also been recently integrated into process retrofitting [24] and conceptual design frameworks [25].…”

Activity Modeling for Integrating Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Consideration as a New Element in Industrial Chemical Process Design

“…The actual development of methyl methacrylate (MMA) processes is investigated as a case study. Heinzle et al (1998); 2, ETH-EHS method by Koller et al (2000); 3, Energy Loss Index (ELI) by Sugiyama (2007) 1. Method Figure 1 shows an overview of the framework (Sugiyama et al, 2008), which is the target of the activity modeling.…”

“…As design objectives, the following three aspects are considered: economy, environmental impacts through product's life-cycle, and hazard in terms of EHS. LCA (ISO 14040-43, 1997(ISO 14040-43, -2000 and ETH-EHS (Koller et al, 2000) methods are selected as appropriate indicators for non-monetary evaluation. As an impact category of LCA, the Cumulative Energy Demand (CED; Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, 1997), which is an energy equivalency of different primary sources used for the production, is selected.…”