ESCAPE21
Porto
Carras Resort, Chalkidiki –
“Addressing key green engineering challenges –
The role of process systems engineering”
Concepción Jiménez-González
GlaxoSmithKline, USA
ABSTRACT:
To
become more sustainable, companies can use green chemistry and engineering
principles in their design and manufacture.
The concept of Green Engineering is not new, but in recent years industry
has paid significantly greater attention to productivity improvements, EHS
hazard elimination and footprint reduction in both research & development
and manufacturing. This is driven by not
only the consideration of cost reduction but also the awareness of increasing
sustainability of processes. For
instance, the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable has
recently identified and published the key green engineering challenges from the
pharmaceutical industry perspective.
The role
of engineers in general, and chemical engineers in particular, is crucial to
delivering greener, safer, more sustainable processes and addressing those
challenges. This also involves
incorporating life cycle thinking to move beyond the boundaries of the company
and include the supply chain and the use and disposal of products. Given their mastery of systems-thinking,
there is a particular role for process systems engineers in this arena,
including process design, the further development of quantitative models and
tools, and finally, the integration of green engineering and sustainability
principles into process and product design and development.
This
presentation will cover some of the green engineering and sustainability
challenges that can be addressed through the application of process systems
engineering, as well as selected examples of industrial application of process
system engineering principles to embed green chemistry and green engineering
into process design within the pharmaceutical industry.