Life-Cycle Approaches for Assessing Green Chemistry Technologies

Abstract

To meet the goals of sustainability and to enable industrial ecology, green chemistry and engineering needs to be studied from a life-cycle perspective. When designed correctly, green chemistry and engineering can affect multiple stages of the life cycle of a product or process. Successful implementations of green chemistry and engineering research are improving the environmental impacts of chemical products and processes in every stage of the life cycle while also offering economic incentives. Analysis of new and existing green chemistry and engineering technologies with quantitative and qualitative metrics can identify and quantify these benefits. The examples presented illustrate the principles of life-cycle assessment as applied to green chemistry and engineering.

A comprehensive overview of elements in bioremediation

“…Whilst Green Chemistry focuses on the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances, it also lays down the ground plan for the design of the green engineering technologies needed to implement sustainable products, processes, and systems (Kirchhoff 2003). The reader is in point of fact directed to the following excellent publications which present and discuss the salient aspects of Green Chemistry and Green Engineering: Anastas and Kirchhoff (2002), Anastas and Zimmerman (2003), Anastas and Lankey (2000), Clark (2006), Höfer and Bigorra (2007), Kirchhoff (2003), Lankey and Anastas (2002), Ran et al (2008), Tang et al (2008) and Tundo et al (2000). The subsequent discussions on bioremediation are contextualized under the 'Green Technology' concept.…”

LCA in Green Chemistry: a new subject area and call for papers

“…2). Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been highlighted as a suitable tool in this context by many authors (Lankey and Anastas 2002;Anastas and Lankey 2000;Domènech et al 2002;Domènech 2005;Yasui 2003;Graedel 1999;Hellweg et al 2004;Sikdar 2003). The potential role of LCA in GC can be summarized by quoting Gustafsson and Börjesson (2007), who concluded in their study on surface coatings about "… the importance of investigating the environmental performance of a product from cradle-to-grave and not only consider it 'green' because it is based on renewable resources or is produced based on the principles of Green Chemistry.…”

Electrochemically-Driven and Green Conversion of SO2 to NaHSO4 in Aqueous Solution

“…Green chemistry has a set of principles to minimize pollution as far as possible in chemical processes, including achieving high value of atom economy in the synthetic process, eliminating toxicity to human health and the environment, minimizing energy consumption, utilizing clean materials, and so on (28,29). Although the aspiration of green chemistry is preferably realized in the manufacturing processes rather than the subsequent cleanup of effluent, the principles are still applicable in the wet FGD process.…”