Page 25 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

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Sustainable Industrial Design and Waste Management
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arrive at the optimum outcome for material recovery without damaging the
environment and depleting the natural resources? Thus, traditional treat-
ment can be partially or completely eliminated for a new waste manage-
ment hierarchy to sustainable treatment.
The optimum approach that industries can use to eliminate environmen-
tal damage completely is to weigh the pros and cons of each technique of the
hierarchy. Economic indicators should be used through cost/benefit analysis as
a primary criterion in making the decision but the health, safety and environ-
ment (HSE) intangible benefits, including the environmental monetary bene-
fits of abating pollution, should be considered. The challenge of industry is to
determine which techniques of the hierarchy, including treatment to some
degree (if applicable), should be followed. Although technical parameters such
as quantity and quality of waste are the primary factors, economical, political,
social and psychological factors are also extremely important.
Innovative sustainable treatment technologies are required to solve the
problem of industrial pollution through each of the cleaner production hier-
archy techniques as will be explained later in detail in Chapter 2, such as:

• Reduction at the source by:
– changing the raw material to one of better quality;
– product modification.
• Reuse directly within a plant or indirectly by other industrial plants
and/or recycle (on site) the waste stream resource.
• Marketing of stream resources (off-site reuse or recycling) and mixed
with another industrial waste to produce a valuable product.
• Recovery of materials by sustainable treatment, for example the grav-
ity oil separator (GOS) and dissolved air flotation (DAF) in the oil and
soap industry to recover fat and grease and recycle the water in order
for the effluent to comply with environment protection regulations.

On the contrary, the less the waste treatment provided by industry, the
greater the cost of environmental damage. If industry does not provide waste
treatment, environmental damage cost will be maximum. This will bring us
to a very complicated formula, which is if no waste treatment the damage
will be high, and if no proper disposal facilities the damage will be high too.
Therefore, what is the solution for sustainable development without dam-
aging the environment and depleting the natural resources? The solution is
to approach a cradle-to-cradle concept through sustainable treatment as will
be defined in sections 1.7 and 1.8 and implemented throughout the book.

1.4 Incineration
Hazardous and non-hazardous, solid and liquid wastes can be incinerated to
convert them into ash. Incineration is the process of thermally combusting