1.1.1 ISO in Brief

ISO is the International Organization for Standardization. It has a membership of 160 national standards institutes from countries large and small, industrialized, developing and in transition, in all regions of the world. ISO's portfolio of more than 18 000 standards provides practical tools for all 3 dimensions of sustainable development: economic, environment, and societal.

ISO standards for business, government, and society as a whole make a positive contribution to the world we live in. They ensure vital features such as quality, ecology, safety, economy, reliability, compatibility, interoperability, conformity, efficiency, and effectiveness. They facilitate trade, spread knowledge, and share technological advances and good management practice. ISO develops only those standards that are required by the market. This work is carried out by experts on loan from the industrial, technical, and business sectors which subsequently put them to use. These experts may be joined by others with relevant knowledge, such as representatives of governmental agencies, testing laboratories, consumer association and academia, and by nongovernmental or other stakeholder organizations that have a specific interest in the issues addressed in the standards. Published under the designation of International Standards, ISO standards represent an international consensus on the state of the art in the technology or good practice concerned.

1.1.2 ISO and the Environment

ISO has a multifaceted approach to meeting the needs of all stakeholders from business, industry, governmental authorities, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as consumers, in the field of the environment.

1. ISO develops standards that help organizations to take a proactive approach to managing environmental issues: the ISO 14000 family of environmental management standards can be implemented in any type of organization in either public or private sectors – from companies to administrations to public utilities.
2. ISO helps to meet the challenge of climate change with standards for greenhouse gas accounting, verification and emissions trading, and for measuring the carbon footprint of products.
3. ISO develops standard documents to facilitate the fusion of business and environmental goals by encouraging the inclusion of environmental aspects in product design.
4. ISO offers a wide‐ranging portfolio of standards for sampling and test methods to deal with specific environmental challenges. It has developed some 570 International Standards for the monitoring of such aspects as the quality of air, water and the soil, as well as noise, radiation, and for controlling the transport of dangerous goods. They also serve in a number of countries as the technical basis for environmental regulations.

1.1.3 Benefits

ISO 14001 was developed primarily to assist companies with a framework for better management control that can result in reducing their environmental impacts. In addition to improvements in performance, organizations can reap a number of economic benefits, including higher conformance with legislative and regulatory requirements (Sheldon 1997) by adopting the ISO standard. By minimizing the risk of regulatory and environmental liability fines and improving an organization's efficiency (Delmas 2009), benefits can include a reduction in waste, consumption of resources, and operating costs. Secondly, as an internationally recognized standard, businesses operating in multiple locations across the globe can leverage their conformance to ISO 14001, eliminating the need for multiple registrations or certifications (Hutchens 2010). Thirdly, there has been a push in the last decade by consumers for companies to adopt better internal controls, making the incorporation of ISO 14001 a smart approach for the long‐term viability of businesses. This can provide them with a competitive advantage against companies that do not adopt the standard (Potoski and Prakash 2005). This in turn can have a positive impact on a company's asset value (Van der Veldt 1997). It can lead to improved public perceptions of the business, placing them in a better position to operate in the international marketplace (Potoski and Prakash 2005; Sheldon 1997). The use of ISO 14001 can demonstrate an innovative and forward‐thinking approach to customers and prospective employees. It can increase a business's access to new customers and business partners. In some markets it can potentially reduce public liability insurance costs. It can serve to reduce trade barriers between registered businesses (Van der Veldt 1997). There is growing interest in including certification to ISO 14001 in tenders for public–private partnerships for infrastructure renewal. Evidence of value in terms of environmental quality and benefit to the taxpayer has been shown in highway projects in Canada.

ISO 14001 addresses not only the environmental aspects of an organization's processes but also those of its products and services. Therefore, ISO/TC 207 has developed additional tools to assist in addressing such aspects. Life‐cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool for identifying and evaluating the environmental aspects of products and services from the “cradle to the grave”: from the extraction of resource inputs to the eventual disposal of the product or its waste. The ISO 14040 standards give guidelines on the principles and conduct of LCA studies that provide an organization with information on how to reduce the overall environmental impact of its products and services. ISO 14064 parts 1, 2, and 3 are international greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting and verification standards which provide a set of clear and verifiable requirements to support organizations and proponents of GHG emission reduction projects.

1.2.1 Environmental Challenges

Our avid interest in environmental sustainability and environmental management issues can be traced directly to awareness that as the world's population continues to expand and to consume natural resources, humanity faces shortages that threaten quality of life in developed areas and elsewhere on the Earth, life itself. In attempts to find solutions to these problems, we have created an ever growing inventory of manufactured goods, chemicals, drugs, ostensibly to improve the quality of life that has in fact contributed to the pollution of our environment. “Pollution prevention,” an environmental buzz word since the 1990s, encompasses designing processes that generate no waste to plants that emit only harmless compounds such as pure water.

Zero defect and zero effect (ZDZE) is different from pollution prevention in that it converts raw materials into useful products or valuable resources that have “no defect” in manufactured products and “zero effect” has no adverse effect on health and environment. In this book, the meanings of “Zero Effect,” “Zero Discharge,” or “Zero Emissions” are complimentary and all terms are used interchangeably (Das 2005). Within the ZDZE paradigm the goal of resource extraction, refining, or commodity production is approached in much the same way that the mining, iron and steel, pulp and paper, petroleum, energy, automobiles, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, fertilizer, agricultural, and chemical industries go about processing raw materials. Sometimes the conversion of wastes or by‐products into resources having value to another industry is more efficient than the implementation of pollution prevention techniques – that is industrial ecology (also see Chapter 9).

In this book, we will focus on the best management practices, best available industrial manufacturing processes, techniques, and technologies that treat raw materials into no‐defect products, as well as innovative and emerging processes that have best potential for achieving the highest standards in pollution prevention at the plant and industry levels, leading to no defect and zero effect (NDZE) – a common goal toward industrial environmental management. To move toward NDZE via process pollution prevention (P3) and profitable pollution prevention (P3), industries must use processes that deploy materials and energy efficiently enough to neutralize and control contaminants in the waste stream. The ultimate goal is to remove pollutants from the waste streams and convert them into products or feeds for other processes. Logically then, P3 refers to industrial manufacturing processes by which materials and energy are efficiently utilized to achieve the end product(s) that have “no defect,” while reducing or eliminating the creation of pollutants or waste at the source that is “zero discharge or zero effect.” The primary goal is to educate the engineering students to prepare them as current and future generation engineers who will learn and practice sustainable engineering and who will be our champion stewards in industrial environmental management as needed caretakers of the Earth.

1.4.1 Resource Efficiency

Resource efficiency reflects the understanding that current, global, economic growth, and development cannot be sustained with the current manufacturing, production, and consumption patterns. Globally, we are extracting more resources to produce goods than the planet can replenish. Resource efficiency is the reduction of the environmental impact from the production and consumption of these goods, from final raw material extraction to last use and disposal. This process of resource efficiency can address sustainability (see Chapter 10).

In this book, we will focus on the upper three options of the industrial pollution prevention hierarchy; that is, recovering the energy value in waste, treating for discharge, and arranging for safe disposal. To improve this bottom line, however, businesses should address the upper three tiers first: that is minimize generation, minimize introduction, and segregate and reuse. This is where the real opportunity exists for reducing the volume of wastes to be treated. The volume of the waste stream, in turn, has a strong influence on treatment cost and applicability. Thus, useful technologies such as membrane processes in highly flexible separation techniques for water, solvent and solute recovery, or condensation of VOCs from air are not economic at large volumetric flow rates. The focus has shifted from end‐of‐the‐pipe solutions to more fundamental structural changes in industrial manufacturing processes.

1.10.1 Analyze Throughput

The first step toward achieving Zero Discharge and/or Zero Emissions is an in‐depth review of the industry to see if total throughput is possible. This means determining whether all material inputs can be found in the final product – if there are no wastes, all inputs must have ended up in the product. One of the few industries where this can occur is cement manufacturing. In the Mini‐Case Study 1.1, however, only a small fraction of the nutrients in the grain ends up in beer.

If throughput is not total, the next step is to determine whether the products manufactured can be easily reintegrated into the ecosystem without additional costs for processing, energy, or transportation. However, since this is rarely possible, most industries will not achieve Zero Discharge unilaterally.

Process and product design engineers will probably find their first opportunities by meeting with their traditional clients, analyzing each client's throughput, and looking for opportunities for pollution prevention and waste minimization that the client's in‐house experts may not have seen. The analysis would include evaluating products and services presently being produced, processes and materials used, and management of environmental issues including energy efficiency, as well as clarifying the full scope of emissions.

1.10.2 Inventory Inputs and Outputs

Once the initial analysis has determined that total throughput is not possible, and that wastes will be generated, the next step is to assess the industry's inputs and outputs, and to inventory all the outputs (“wastes”). A diagram of the inputs and outputs of a system like that of Figures 1.2, 1.5, and 1.6 are then used to compile basic overview of the company's resources and needs. From this information, design engineers and process specialists can attempt to modify the manufacturing process so that it can become a Zero Emissions system.

Extracting raw materials and processing them imposes significant environmental burdens. An analysis of the industrial metabolism of the product (i.e. its input, materials use, and life cycle expectancy) will help determine the path of least environmental impact. Some materials choices will yield better throughput or by‐products that are more suited for use as an input for another industry.

Additional audits and inventories may be needed to determine manufacturing efficiency by percentage of input wasted, to quantify amounts of waste landfill by type of material, to account for amounts of materials collected for recycling, and to identify major emissions of waste heat and the site and amounts of wastewater discharges. Analysis of these outputs may reveal the most effective ways to reuse these outputs and help to determine which industries could use the wastes as raw materials. For example, at the Namibian brewery, spent grain, excess heat, and wastewater all have potential uses in producing food items.

1.10.3 Build Industrial Clusters

In sectors that cannot achieve Zero Emissions unilaterally, it may be necessary to build industrial clusters. The input–output analysis leads directly into development of clusters of industries that can use each other's outputs. Developing effective clusters calls for executives look beyond single industries and make innovative connections among seemingly unrelated potential partners in new industrial clusters. Companies are loathe to implement such changes, however. In addition to concerns about antitrust regulations, and the need to rely on single vendors for supply, there is fear that relinquishing information about waste stream composition will allow their competitors to deduce proprietary secrets.

Also critical is the geographic location of the client's potential partners, as transportation is a key factor in optimizing waste exchange and use of conversion technologies. The most obvious link in the search for industrial cluster partners will be obtaining industrial input data for other industrial sectors and determining if the client's waste flows could serve (in some converted form) as a material input to another sector. The second place to look for candidate industrial clusters is the historical records of waste exchanges. These material flows will demonstrate which materials being discarded by a sector are of a volume and quality desirable to another sector.

Industries that buy process wastes are taking in nonvirgin material of a grade that may fall short of the purchasers' specification. This is an opportunity for materials blending. For example, plastics can be recycled to make a lumber‐like product, but the grade of such recycled products is not always acceptable as a direct input. If a contaminated waste flow is not of sufficient volume, however, blending in virgin plastics can bring both quality and volume up to manufacturing specifications.

Once the potential partners have been identified, the industrial cluster should be designed and developed. Kalundborg (Grann 1994) is an excellent example of a cluster that includes heavy industries, while Tsumeb's cluster is based primarily around food production and processing. Elsewhere in the world, industrial cluster is yet to be developed.

India and China are industrializing nations that have abundant and cheap supplies of coal, but burning it to generate electricity produces CO₂, SO _x , and NO _x . The key to sustainability for industrializing countries will therefore be development of industrial clusters that link energy, agriculture, and sewage treatment, in the fundamental format for Zero Emission communities. The most effective incentive to develop such clusters is economics, and, unlike conventional SO _x and NO _x treatments, the system for the electron beam/ammonia conversation of these pollutant has a financial payback of 10–15 years. Section 9.2.3 treats this technology in more detail.

1.10.4 Develop Conversion Technologies

The easiest connections for industrial clusters are through a simple, direct waste exchange. The next easiest route is to develop an intermediary process that will take one industry's current waste stream, convert it to a usable form, and transfer it to a purchasing industry. Now we consider briefly the pivotal function of conversion technologies as illustrated by the problems encountered in the paper recycling industry as it works toward attaining Zero Emissions in the United States (see also Chapters 7 and 9).

Paper recycling is quintessentially “green.” But current processes used to de‐ink paper remove only 70–80% of the ink particles, leaving recycled papers an unattractive gray. The wastes are a toxic mix of ink, short fibers, coating chemicals, and paper fillers that requires both primary and secondary treatment before disposal. De‐inking is both inefficient and expensive, and results in a product that is often higher priced and lower quality.

Under the auspices of ZD industries, a conversion technology is being developed that results in 100% removal of ink and 3 viable outputs. The recaptured ink could be reused in printing or for making pencils (as is already done with ink from photocopiers). The long fibers could be made into paper again or used in cardboard. The remaining sludgy mixture of short fibers and residues could be dried and used as acoustic insulation inside building walls or as ceiling tiles. The sludge could be used to make shock‐absorbent packaging such as egg cartons or replacements for corrugated cardboard.

The industrial cluster built around paper recycling thus includes recapturing ink, making new paper, and making building and packaging materials. Canada, Latvia, and Italy have tested this conversion technology, the steam explosion system. Many cities, states, and national governments, however, require that recycled paper be used in newspapers, and where these regulations are in force, a system that produces a grade of paper better than that needed by newspapers is not likely to be implemented.

1.10.5 Designer Wastes

So‐called designer wastes can serve as direct feedstock to another sector, or, if properly processed through a conversion technology, as processed feedstock. If the beer industry for example, used a sugar‐based cleanser instead of a caustic cleanser for its bottle‐washing process, the discharge water could serve as a direct feed to fish ponds, without needing any conversion. Yet other solutions will require installation assistance in adjusting or adapting material flows within the client's processes so that its waste output is in an acceptable form.

Building industrial clusters may involve working upstream within a facility to modify its production process so that the waste is produced in an acceptable “designer” form for conversion. Or, perhaps downstream, working with the purchaser industry, to help it modify its processes so that it can accept the converted waste.

This means that the involved engineering consultants must become familiar with the products and materials provided by suppliers to the producer and the materials needed by the purchaser of the designer wastes. All parties must have access to a database of specific information about the level of impurities acceptable in each final product. For example, companies that produce basic material inputs (such as plastics, oils, lubricants, and papers) deal in high volumes and some manufacturing processes can tolerate impurities. These companies are already experienced in their own refining processes and may also be knowledgeable about the manufacturing requirements of their customers, but their expertise may not extend to particular impurities present in the producer's waste stream. The database can provide the information necessary to complete the connections.

1.10.6 Reinvent Regulatory Policies

Experienced professionals are probably already aware of how government policies inadvertently inhibit creativity in reuse of wastes. These policies can also inhibit formation of effective industrial clusters. For example, breweries are regulated as an industry and the facilities are generally located in industrial areas. However, to make efficient use of their discharge water in aquaculture, breweries should be located in agricultural zones. Similarly, regulations aimed at providing a market for recycled newsprint need to be revised so that technologies that produce a better grade of paper can flourish – and allow more complete reuse of all the other by‐products associated with complete de‐inking.

Ironically, ZD goals are inhibited in the United States by regulations pursuant to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA). Transferring “wastes” among the members of industrial clusters is often prohibited by RCRA because its regulatory net entangles all wastes, whether hazardous or not. Its broad scope has the unintended consequences of creating disincentives to invest in recovery technologies and blocking progress toward pollution prevention and recycling. RCRA waste classifications can put kinks in potential closed‐loop systems. Indeed, as Robert Herman (1989) put it, “the essence of the environmental crisis is not nearly so much bad actors as the whole, often contradictory structure of incentives in the economy.” Regulatory policies need to be reinvented to foster development of breakthrough conversion technologies and encourage cross‐sector markets for designer wastes.

1.11.1 Recycling of Materials and Reuse of Products

A critical element of an interim strategy is enhanced recovery. This can be approached from two directions: reuse of products and recycling of materials. Reuse of products includes return, reconditioning, and remanufacturing. The energy required for reuse and recycling is one of the key factors determining recoverability of a product. The closer the recovered product is to the form it needs to be in for recycling, the less energy is required to make that transformation. From the standpoint of economic development it is worth pointing out that the reconditioning or remanufacturing cycle is relatively less costly; it requires roughly half the energy and twice the labor per physical unit of output.

Recycling materials means closing the loop between the supply of post‐consumer waste and the demand for resources for production. Recycling of materials will be the business of the Zero Emissions engineer; reuse of products will also involve the Zero Emissions engineer, but it will have lots of front‐end work from another professional, the concurrent engineer. Concurrent engineering, which incorporates aspects of industrial engineering, product design, and product manufacturing, is an integrated approach that seeks to optimize materials, assembly, and factory operation. These engineers examine the broader context of a product, including technology for managing the environmental impacts of its transport, intended use, recyclability, and disposal, as well as the environmental consequences of the extraction of the raw material used in its production.

The ultimate fate of all materials is thus dissipation, being discarded, or recycling and recovery. With 94% of materials extracted from the environment being converted to wastes, current levels of recovery are clearly not sufficient. Recovery of materials from wastes will reduce the extent of resource extraction (but will not slow the speed of material flows through the economy). Aluminum and lead are two resources currently being heavily recycled, but evidence shows that there is potential for a lot more resources to be recovered from wastes.

Sherwood plots are diagrams that permit the graphic comparison of concentrations of materials in nature against their commodity cost. The sample plot in Figure 1.7 shows that the price for a commodity depends on its concentration in nature before extraction and refining. Figure 1.8 is a similar plot for metal price (2004) as a function of dilution (concentration) of metals in commercial ores; the relationship illustrates the concept that the more dilute a material is in its native ore, the more expensive it will be to purify into a commodity material (Johnson et al. 2007).

Together, the Sherwood plots demonstrate the recovery potential of materials. The elements plotted above the line in Figure 1.7 should be vigorously recycled because they are present in individual by‐products in relatively high concentrations. Lead, zinc, copper, nickel, mercury, arsenic, silver, selenium, antimony, and thallium are more economical to recover from waste than from nature. Extensive waste trading could significantly reduce the quantity of material requiring disposal because resource extraction uses from wastes, not virgin feedstocks (Allen and Behmanesh 1994).

1.11.2 Dematerilization

One critical component of the industrial ecology paradigm is dematerialization. Dematerialization means using less material to make products that perform the same function as predecessors. Sometimes this means smaller or lighter products, but other aspects can include increasing the lifetime of a product or its efficiency. The net effect is a reduction in overall resource extraction. Dematerialization is thus a way to increase the percentage of active materials embodied in durables, and to reduce the percentage that is left as waste residuals.

However, dematerialization has limits in achieving Zero Emissions. We may also need to think of rematerialization – products that may or may not have a lighter weight in their final form, but whose production, use, and subsequent conversion or recyclability fits within the Zero Emissions paradigm. This is demonstrated by the ease and benefit of recycling older model cars versus the newer ones. Nonetheless, economists and engineers point out that optimizing for environmental protection alone means some loss in safety, efficiency, durability, convenience, attractiveness, and price.

1.11.3 Investment Recovery

During the transition to Zero Emissions, another early need will be for companies to fill the “decomposer niche,” a term for a specialized form of recycling developed by Raymond Cote at Dalhousie University in Ottawa (1995). Just as decomposer organisms turn dead animals and vegetable matter into forms that can become food for other animals and plants, decomposer niche companies will “consume” otherwise unusable wastes by processing them into usable feedstock or disassembling equipment and marketing reusable components and materials.

The work of decomposers also can be visualized as investment recovery. Taking a systematic approach to ending waste, investment recovery is a traditional service, according to Cote, “an integrated business process that identified, for redeployment, recycling, or remarketing, nonproductive assets generated in the normal course of business.” These assets include idle, obsolete, unused, or inoperable equipment, machinery, or facilities; excess raw materials, operating inventories, and supplies; construction debris; equipment and fixtures in facilities scheduled for demolition; off‐grade, out of specification, or discontinued products; and process waste (Cote 1995, 2003).

The goal of investment recovery is to develop strategies and procedures to recapture the highest value from all surplus assets in a company or community. It seeks to reduce operating and disposal costs, prevent disposal of assets as waste, and find markets for redistributing the by‐products for increased economic value. One of the operating paradigms for an investment recovery firm would be integration of its functions into a comprehensive strategy for an eco‐industrial park. Firms that specialize in this work base their fees on a retainer plus a percent of savings and/or revenues if there is an incentive.

1.11.4 New Technologies and Materials

During transitional stages, existing industries can be identified as potential members of a cluster if minimal design engineering can make them compatible and most of the transfers of materials are occurring in a more basic commodity form, rather than as “designer wastes.” Once Zero Emissions has been incorporated at the drawing board level, facilities can be planned to work together in clusters so that the by‐products of each enterprise meet the feedstock specifications of other industries in the cluster. This will require innovations in materials and methods alike.

1.11.5 New Mindset

As a result of changes in materials and processes, engineering professionals will have to expand the purview of their design parameters. A larger, more integrated design for facilities and manufacturing processes is called for. This is where design for environment comes in: DFE examines the life cycle of the product and considers not only its primary use but the environmental consequences of its production, assembly, testing, servicing, and recycling. In designing an eco‐industrial park, for example, manufacturing processes would be linked to material flows and to energy flows. As a result, the design period and overall costs would be higher. Return on investment, however, would be much shorter (see Sections 7.3 and 7.3.1).

1.11.6 In the Full ZD (Emission) Paradigm

Designing ZD systems requires an expansion of the focus and outputs of the traditional design engineer. Concurrent engineers need to incorporate design for the environment. Industrial engineers need to think in terms of industrial clusters. Environmental engineers need to understand upstream processes better so that they can develop designer wastes. Environmental engineers also need to revamp their processes to begin mimicking resource refining.

ZD engineering firms are expected to be working with design for environment engineers, concurrent engineers, and industrial engineers. They should all be seeking to design wastes, conversion processes, and industrial clusters. Setting the stage for overall product design, the industrial ecology approach assists companies in looking beyond the product to its functionality over its life cycle. Services and products should be designed and delivered differently as the following six strategic elements of industrial ecology are applied:

• Selection of materials with desired properties at the outset
• Use of “just in time” materials
• Substitution of processes to eliminate toxic feedstock
• Modification of processes to contain, remove, and treat toxics in waste streams
• Engineering of a robust and reliable process
• Consideration of durability and end of life recyclability

ZD solutions that use conversion technologies should be developed, designed, built, and marketed by the appropriate professionals who understand not only the industrial clusters and the processes involved but also the upstream and downstream requirements.

1.12.1 The Challenges in Industrial Environmental Management

We need to educate and train current generation engineers, managers, business owners, and policy makers with the skills and knowledge they need to be our champion stewards of environmental management and expert on lean manufacturing of major industries demonstrating ZDZE operations. Engineers have always faced design constraints. Historically, these constraints were the laws of physics, availability of materials, and energy. Modern engineers still face the limitation of the laws of physics but have been granted larger amounts of energy and a wide variety of materials. Modern society has added design parameters that include safety, durability, convenience, regulatory compliance, attractiveness, and price.

A true engineer does not view regulation as an obstruction, but rather as a design constraint like efficiency and durability. The goal has always been to develop the optimal design within given constraints, whether they are the laws of nature or society. Unfortunately, the actions of our modern society have placed undue burdens on nature. Nature's ability to absorb excessive amounts of pollutants and stressors while still providing critical services of acceptable water quality, clean air, food, and biodiversity is limited.

Industrial ecology is Western society's response to meeting the challenge of sustainable development. To manufacturers falls the challenge of attaining Zero Emissions. They in turn pass this directive to their engineers. To engineers, the advance of technology has meant increasing degrees of freedom with regard to design. The collective body of knowledge and our harnessing of materials and energy has been the source of these freedoms. Safety was the first man‐made design constraint that society imposed under the name of social good. Engineers responded to meet the challenge. Now society recognizes the need to impose a design parameter of Zero Emissions. Engineers will meet this challenge and accept it as they have the laws of physics – as a given.

1.12.2 Codes of Ethics in Engineering

Codes of ethics state the moral responsibilities of engineers as seen by the profession, and as represented by a professional society. Because they express the profession's collective commitment to ethics, codes are enormously important, not only in stressing engineers' responsibilities but also the freedom to exercise them.

Codes of ethics play at least eight essential roles: serving and protecting the public, providing guidance, offering inspiration, establishing shared standards, supporting responsible professionals, contributing to education, deterring wrongdoing, and strengthening a profession's image (also see Appendix J).

1.13.1 What Is in the Book?

Chapter 1: This chapter addresses why industrial environmental management is important! Environmental management is a very crucial part of human well‐being that needs to be deeply considered. Formulated design seeks to steer the development process to take advantage of opportunities, avoid hazards, mitigate problems, and prepare people for unavoidable difficulties by improving adaptability and resilience. It is a process concerned with human–environment interactions, and seeks to identify: what is environmentally desirable; what are physical, economic, social and technological constraints to achieving that process; and what are the most feasible options. Actually, there can be no concise universal definition of environmental management; however, it can be briefly summarized as supporting sustainable development; demanding multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary or even holistic approaches; it should integrate and reconcile different development viewpoints, co‐ordinate science, engineering, technology, social, policy making, and planning; state proactive processes; timescales and concerns ranging from local to global issues; and one stresses stewardship rather than exploitation while dealing with a world affected by humans.

In other perspectives, environmental management can be explained as methods of ways when dealing issues due to the importance of the need to improve environmental stewardship by integrating ecology, policy making, planning, and social development. The goals include sustaining and (if possible) improving existing resources; preventing and overcoming environmental problems; establishing limits; founding and nurturing institutions that effectively support environmental research, monitoring, and management resources; warning of threats and identifying positive change opportunities; (where possible) improving quality of life; and finally, identifying new technology or policies that are useful.

Chapter 2: The objective of this chapter is to introduce the genesis of world environmental problems and to provide an overview of the history behind present environmental laws and regulations of pollution in various countries and continents.

Engineers in all disciplines practice a profession that must obey rules governing their professional conduct and ethics. One important set of rules that all engineers should be aware of is environmental statues, which are laws enacted by US Congress and governments of other countries around the world.

Environmental law, also known as environmental and natural resources law, is a collective term describing the network of treaties, statutes, regulations, common, and customary laws addressing the effects of human activity on the natural environment. The core environmental law regimes address environmental pollution. A related but distinct set of regulatory regimes, now strongly influenced by environmental legal principles, focus on the management of specific natural resources, such as forests, minerals, or fisheries. Other areas, such as environmental impact assessment, may not fit neatly into either category but are important components of environmental law.

Chapter 3: This chapter provides a summary of industrial wastewater sources, wastewater characteristics, wastewater treatment, reuse and discharge, industrial sources of air pollutions, inventories, air pollution control, solid waste and hazardous waste characteristics, treatments, and management.

Industrial waste is the waste produced by industrial activity which includes any material that is rendered unusable during a manufacturing process such as that of factories, industries, mills, and mining operations. Mass manufacturing has existed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Some examples of industrial wastes are discussed including (but not limited to) chemical solvents, paints, sandpaper, paper products, industrial by‐products, metals, plastics, and radioactive wastes.

Toxic waste, chemical waste, industrial solid waste, and municipal solid waste are designations of industrial wastes. Sewage treatment plants can treat some industrial wastes, i.e. those consisting of conventional pollutants such as biochemical oxygen demand, COD, suspended solid, and total suspended solid. Industrial wastes containing toxic pollutants require specialized treatment systems.

Chapter 4: This chapter describes and deals with various important aspects of selecting the best remedial control technologies for pollutants, managing wastes, monitoring, sampling industrial water, air, and solid and hazardous materials, modes of sample collections, sample analyses by various analytical, physical–chemical methods approved by governmental agency, as required quality control and quality assurance, properly conducted laboratory auditing, testing, monitoring, permitting, report keeping, reporting, and compliance with local, state, and federal governments for discharging wastewater, emitting air, pollutants, and safely disposing of solid and hazardous materials.

Chapter 5: This chapter addresses risk assessment, which is an organized process used to describe and estimate the likelihood of adverse health and environmental impacts from exposures to chemicals released to air, water, and land. Risk assessment is also a systematic, analytical method used to determine the probability of adverse effects. A common application of risk assessment methods is to evaluate human health and ecological impacts of chemical releases into the environment. Information collected from environmental monitoring or modeling is incorporated into models of worker activity and exposure forms conclusion about the likelihood of adverse effects are formulated. As such, risk assessment is an important tool for making decisions with environmental and public health consequences, along with economic, societal, technological, and political consequences of proposed actions. This chapter addresses the assessment of risks to human health as well as ecological risks and, briefly, ecological risk management. In addition a major section is devoted to industrial and manufacturing process safety, federal and state occupational safety laws and regulations, and management occupational health.

Chapter 6: This chapter describes the wastes produced by industrial activities, which include materials that are rendered unusable during manufacturing processes such as that of factories, industries, mills, and mining operations. This wastefulness has existed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Some examples of industrial wastes and sources are chemicals and allied products, solvents, pigments, sludge, metals, ash, paints, furniture and fixtures, paper and allied products, plastics, rubber, leather, textile mill products, petroleum refining and related industries, electronic equipment and components, industrial by‐products, metals, radioactive wastes, miscellaneous manufacturing industries, and the list goes on. Hazardous or toxic wastes, chemical waste, industrial solid waste, and municipal solid waste are also designations of industrial wastes.

More than 12 billion T of industrial wastes are generated annually in the United States alone. This is roughly equivalent to more than 40 T of waste for every man, woman, and a child in the United States. The sheer magnitude of these numbers is cause for big environmental concern and drives us to identify the characteristics of the wastes, the various industrial operations that are generating the waste, the manner in which the waste are being managed, and the industrial pollution prevention policy and strategies. The first portion of this chapter is devoted to the pollution prevention hierarchy. Next there is an overview of how LCA tools can be applied to choose best available technologies (BACT) to minimize the waste at various stages of manufacturing processes of products. Finally, a few case studies on industrial competitive processes and products applying LCA tools are reviewed; and hence, also selections of BACT to demonstrate hierarch pollution prevention (P²) and environmental performance strategies.

Chapter 7: The role of economics in pollution prevention is of tantamount important, even as important as the ability to identify technologies changes to the process, new and emerging technologies, ZD technologies', technologies for biobased engineered chemicals, products, renewable energy sources, and associated costs. This chapter shows some methods that can be used to assess the costs of implementing pollution prevention technologies and making cost comparisons to evaluate the cost‐effectiveness of various operations. The concept of best available control technologies is introduced and we analyze the costs and benefits of manufacturing biobased products. The topics treated illustrate that biobased new development can lead to sustainable economic progress and a healthier planet.

Sustainable development is about creating a business climate in which better goods and services are produced using less energy and materials with no or less waste and pollution. Natural steps and systems are a model for thinking about how to produce, consume, and live in sustainable cycles: nature produces little or no waste, relies on free and abundant energy from sun, and uses renewable resources. In this chapter, we focus on a framework that integrates environmental, social, and economic interests into effective chemical and allied business strategies.

Chapter 8: In this chapter our major focus is on lean manufacturing of various products while applying techniques and methodologies to achieve zero defects in products, and significantly eliminate waste and discharges to environment from the manufacturing process.

The quality of products, processes, and services has become a major decision factor in most industries and businesses today. Regardless of whether the consumer is an individual, a corporation, a military defense program, or a retail store, the consumer is making purchase decisions, he or she is likely to consider quality to be equal in importance to cost and schedule. Consequently, quality improvement has become a major concern to industries and businesses.

Quality means fitness for use with zero defects or zero effects in environmentally conscious manufacturing. For example, you or I may purchase automobiles that we expect to be free of manufacturing defects and that should provide reliable and economical transportation, a retailer buys finished goods with the expectation that they are properly packaged and arranged for easy storage and display, and a manufacturer buys raw material and expects to process it with no rework or scrap. In other words, all consumers expect that the products and services they buy will meet their requirements. These requirements define fitness for use.

Quality or fitness for use is determined through the interaction of quality of design and quality of conformance. Quality of design for environment and other aspects is defined by the different grades or levels of performance, reliability, serviceability, and function that are the result of deliberate engineering and environmental management decisions. By quality of conformance, we mean systematic reduction of variability and elimination of defects until every unit, batch, and product produced is identical in physical and chemical properties (zero defect and zero effect).

Chapter 9: The rate of industrial hazardous waste generation in the United States is approximately 750 million T/Y. Once these materials are designated as hazardous, the costs of managing, treating, storing, and disposing of them increase dramatically. This chapter describes some specific industrial waste minimization processes and technologies that have been successfully operating and provides other methodologies including industrial ecology, eco‐industrial park, manufacturing process intensification, and integration. The wastes (in air, water, or as solid) or by‐products generated during manufacturing process are recovered. The materials and energy recovered from waste streams either are reused in the plant or are sold to another plant as feedstock. It is possible in practice, as well as in theory, to isolate some industrial facilities almost completely from the environment by recycling all wastes into materials that can then be manufactured into consumer products. An example of such a facility is a coal‐fired power plant. An electron beam–ammonia conversion unit adds ammonia to the effluent gases, which then irradiates electronically, producing ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate that are sold as feedstock to fertilizer manufacturing; there is enhanced recovery of mercury from flue gas by adsorption and mercury recovery is complete. The details of these two processes are given as case studies later in Sections 9.2 and 9.4. Also, two separate case studies have been presented that highlight a profitable “waste‐to‐energy” recovery generating electricity and heat, and making chemicals and energy from gasification of black liquor as by‐products of pulping process.

Our goal is to modify industrial processes so that services and manufactured goods can be produced without waste. But it is important to understand that some manufacturing processes inherently produce wastes, even after all reasonable efforts at pollution prevention. Thus, in some cases the use of a conversion technology may be more appropriate than a program of pollution prevention: many industrial wastes can be processed to render them viable as material inputs to another industry or to part of an industrial cluster of several connected industries – as part of the movement of “industrial ecology.”

Chapter 10: Engineers play an important role in global sustainable manufacturing and development by designing production systems for materials: minerals, chemicals, energy, water, electricity generation and distribution, transportation, buildings plus other structures, and consumer products. These designs have impact on the environment, economics, and societal benefits at scales that vary from local to global and temporal scales that vary from minutes to decades. As engineers create designs, they do not only evaluate their designs at multiple use and sustainability index (scale), they also embed their designs in complex systems.

The field of transportation provides an illustration of the multiple layers of systems in which engineers create designs. Among the most visible products designed by engineers are automobiles. Engineers design engines, and improvements to the design of a fossil fuel–powered engine for an automobile can increase fuel efficiency and reduce environmental impacts of emissions associated with burning fuels, while simultaneously reducing the cost of operating the vehicle. The size, power, and fuel efficiency of the engine must be balanced with the weight of the vehicle. The use of materials and fuels by automobiles are embedded in complex fuel and material supply systems. Developing systems to recycle the materials that make up the automobile at the end of its useful life might improve the environmental and economic performance of global materials flows. Use of alternative power sources, such as electricity or biofuels can impact flows of fuels, which, in turn, might impact global flows of materials such as water. Finally, the design of cities that reduce the need for personal transportation could dramatically reduce the environmental impacts of transportation systems and would also transform social structures.

In this chapter, sustainable design is very much emphasized and lays a foundation. Sustainable engineering is the design, commercialization, and use of processes and products that are feasible and economical while minimizing both the generation of pollution at the source and the risk to human health and the environment. The discipline embraces the concept that decisions to protect human health and the environment can have the greatest impact and cost effectiveness when applied early in the “design and development phase of a process or product.” Sustainable engineering transforms existing engineering disciplines and practices to those that promote sustainability. This new discipline incorporates the development and implementation of technologically and economically viable products, processes, and systems that promote human welfare while protecting human health and elevating the protection of the biosphere as a criterion in engineering solutions. To fully implement sustainable green engineering solutions, engineers use numerous principles and tools that are described in this chapter.