Reducing water and energy consumption in chemical industry by sustainable production approach: a pilot study for polyethylene terephthalate production

Climate Impact of Primary Plastic Production

“…1 Free-radical polymerization is a type of chain-growth polymerization in which the polymer is formed by successive additions of building blocks to a propagating radical chain; this can occur under bulk, solution, emulsion, suspension (slurry), and high temperature/pressure conditions [48]. Polymerization requires a high amount of electric power, and the energy intensity of this process ranges from 2.9 to 9 gigajoule (GJ) per tonne of LDPE in the literature [49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. This wide range could be attributed to the reactor type (i.e., tubular vs autoclave) and varying levels of technology efficiency in the market, as well as desired polymer characteristics (e.g., strength, flexibility, etc.).…”

“…Section 3.2 provides more details on these polymerization processes. According to the literature, the energy intensity of the solution and suspension processes ranges between 2.7 and 3 GJ per tonne of LLDPE, while the gas-stage process has a higher energy consumption range of 3.8 to 4.1 GJ per tonne [49][50][51]. In this study, for LLDPE polymerization, we assume a weightedaverage unit energy consumption of 3.3 GJ per tonne of LLDPE.…”

Multidimensional Assessment of Eco-Innovation Implementation: Evidence from Spanish Agri-Food Sector

“…Most of these investigations introduce water and energy consumption [8,39] as EI indicators. For example, Alkaya and Demirer [40] apply them in a review of the Turkish chemical industry, Catellacci and Lie [9] utilize them to analyze the manufacturing sector in Korea, and Rodríguez and Weingarten [10] in a study on the German industry sector. Other process EI indicators contemplated by researches, which ensure the efficient use of natural resources while optimizing the level of waste in the production and commercialization processes, are the reuse of components or materials [35] and their recycling [8,10,36].…”

Mathematical modeling and environmental analysis of heat pumps integrated in aprocess to treat spent pickling liquors

“…Other authors studied the variation of design parameters (Xu et al, 1999;Arun et al, 2000) or introduced other technologies (Chua et al, 2010;Wongwises and Disawas, 2005) to increase the performance of heat pumps integrated in a chemical processes (Alkaya and Demirer, 2015;2014a). Only few studies were carried out with operations of optimization in order to improve the COP (Guo et al, 2011;Demesa et al, 2015).…”