Symposium on Clean Water - Clean Air - Clean
Earth
This symposium is focused on research for developing clean technologies
for the chemical industry. New and innovative clean technologies are needed to meet the ever-increasing
environmental, quality, and processing cost requirements of the chemical industry. Process intensification,
pioneered in the 80’s, implies the prospect of a smaller footprint for a chemical plant with increased
process efficiency. Early stages of process intensification were focused on the bulk chemical industry and
have since expanded to newer areas of research, such as value added chemical and pharmaceutical active
ingredient sectors.
This symposium addresses the need to gain a comprehensive understanding
of air pollution sources from chemical plants and other process systems and to develop integration
technologies to control or eliminate the sources. Research and technologies that target pollution prevention
by means of cleaner transportation and power generation will be discussed, including: clean coal
technologies, NOx storage and reduction catalysis, soot oxidation, sulphur entrapment, and fuel cell
development.
Water resource management strategies, such as by-product process water
re-use and waste water treatment, help cope with water shortages in the chemical industry by recycling large
volumes of water from high consumption operations. Water treatment of brackish water or sea water using
de-salination, filtration and other membrane-based separation processes can minimize the use of potable
water. Reducing chemical effluent volumes and reclaiming waste for extraction of value added chemicals
through the development of fully integrated processing strategies lead to increased profitability and benefit
the environment.
In-situ and ex-situ bio remediation technologies have been identified
as “green” technologies that are viable for the chemical industry. Technologies such as
Phytoremediation that bio-accumulate heavy metals and toxins are also under consideration for treating
process waste. Biomass containing collected toxins can then be harvested and the toxins concentrated by
incineration.
