Industrial Environmental Performance Metrics Challenges and Opportunities (1999) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Chemical Industry
5 The Chemical Industry
Pages 85-106
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From page 85... ...
Department of Commerce to categorize chemical companies. The categories are industrial inorganic chemicals; plastics, materials, and synthetics; drugs; soap, cleaners, and toilet goods; paints and allied products; industrial organic chemicals; agricultural chemicals; and miscellaneous chemical products.
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From page 86... ...
chemical products produced in 1995 represented about 24 percent of the worldwide market, which was then valued at $1.3 trillion. Countries that rank next in production are Japan, Germany, and France.
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From page 87... ...
launched the Responsible care program in 1988 in response to public concerns about chemical safety. The program commits CMA member companies to continuously improve health and safety by implementing six codes of management practice: community awareness and emergency response, pollution prevention, process safety, distribution, employee health and safety, and product stewardship.
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From page 89... ...
However, to facilitate comparison with the other industries analyzed in this report, the chemical industry metrics are discussed in terms of manufacturing process and product performance. Manufacturing Metrics As in the automotive sector, environmental performance in the chemical industry is monitored and guided by environmental staff, but ultimate responsibility lies with the site operations manager.
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From page 92... ...
As refinements to emissions metrics and other environmental performance metrics are made, it would be worth considering normalization against dollar value of product or, better still, dollar of value added to society. The latter is difficult to determine but would perhaps be more appropriate for sustainable-development discussions.
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From page 93... ...
This would require a weighting system that takes into account the effects of a range of factors, such as persistent bioaccumulative toxicity, ozone depletion, global warming, atmospheric and surface water acidification, human health effects, photochemical ozone generation, aquatic oxygen demand, and aquatic toxicity.~° Current regulatory-derived metrics treat all emissions alike and do not take into account differences in hazard potential. One current effort to address this situation is a system of potency metrics developed by Imperial Chemical Industries, a U.K.
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From page 94... ...
94 INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE METRICS first publicized by 3M, has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of waste reduction activities and is the most cited nonregulatory-driven environmental metric. A variation on this metric is the material efficiency ratio, or the amount of product sold divided by the amount of all materials purchased, sometimes including packaging (Box 5-4~.
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From page 95... ...
and materials efficiency, are factors in designing new technology. Yield is the ratio of the amount of product sold to the amount of product that should have been produced for sale based on the purchase of raw materials and assuming no waste, no side reactions ("perfect" control of chemistry)
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From page 96... ...
However, process uptime is a critical environmental metric because waste generation rates during start-ups and shutdowns are frequently far greater than during normal operations. A newly emerging concept is atomic efficiency, which is the ratio of the output atoms to input atoms based on chemical stoichiometry.
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From page 97... ...
Environmental impacts related to these chemicals, therefore, must be considered within the context in which they are transported, used, and disposed of. Bother potential greenhouse gases that may be tracked include methane, other volatile organic chemicals, nitrogen oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, and other longer-life volatile compounds that can have greater climate change potential than CO2 per unit of mass (although compared with CO2, they are present in the atmosphere in much smaller quantities)
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From page 98... ...
to minimize adverse safety and environmental impacts during final use and disposal. Specific efforts include staff training in the safe handling of acids and toxic gases; environmental audits and planning with customers to reduce emissions; reformulating chemicals to avoid volatile solvents or ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
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From page 100... ...
SUMMARY OF ENVIRONMENTAL METRICS IN THE CHEMICAL SECTOR The metrics used in the chemical sector, as in the automotive sector, can be categorized in terms of resource use and environmental burden. These are shown in Table 5-1, along with health and safety metrics that are generally collected by the same environmental health and safety staff.
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From page 101... ...
Material intensitya · Value per pound · Pounds replaced · Resources saved Energy intensitya · Value/BTU used · Energy saved by use Renewable · Percent of product · Recyclable Packaging · Recyclable · Biodegradable Toxic dispersion · Global warming · Ozone depletion · Persistence · Bioaccumulative · Hormone mimics etc. continued
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From page 102... ...
The latter frequently far outweighs the product's own materials or energy intensity. For example, plastics that reduce energy and material consumption by enabling lightweighting of cars through substitution for metals have an energy and material profile of their own, which at a large-systems level may be minuscule when compared with their environmental benefits.
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From page 103... ...
While proponents of weighting and aggregation argue that such efforts can lead to better decision making, critics suggest that rather than more sophisticated metrics, it is more simple and useful metrics that are required. Furthermore, basic management approaches to improving environmental performance have yielded more challenging goals.
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From page 104... ...
These metrics are addressing such issues as energy efficiency, including considerations for energy from truly renewable sources; materials efficiency, including considerations for truly renewable materials; capability for recycling and recycle content; and toxic dispersion corrected for quantified toxicity and for exposure pathway. In each of these areas there is a need to develop a common understanding of the concept of sustainability, develop metrics that drive continuous improvement, garner public acceptance for sustainability metrics, and establish benchmarks against which individual companies can measure themselves.
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From page 105... ...
Paper in Green Tech.Knowledge~y: Information and Knowledge Systems for Improving Environmental Performance. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
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