• Achievements
• Innovators
• Frontiers

• Pollution
  Prevention
• Sustainability
• Reducing Greenhouse Gases

Modern sewage treatment plants use a bioprocess based on chemical engineering principles that purifies wastewater and produces a biosolid reusable in soil. Photo by Steve Jurvetson/Flickr.

Conservation of the world's limited resources, especially nonrenewable raw materials, is an important legacy for the future. Chemical engineers have already begun to move past pollution prevention and are taking the next step into sustainable development.

In the sustainable mode the objective is to leave the earth in the same or better condition for future generations.

Chemical engineers play a central role in achieving sustainability goals. They are concerned with

• Improving the chemical processes that convert raw materials into finished products,
• Reducing fuel consumption through better energy efficiency and product yield,
• Maximizing the reuse of valuable by-products,
• Decreasing the use of scarce natural resources and fossil fuels, and
• Eliminating the release of harmful pollutants into the environment.

These goals may be achieved through the aggressive use of such relatively simple techniques as recycling and reuse of materials and through more complex efforts, such as highly engineered closed-loop or zero-discharge industrial operations. Here process waste-stream operations are reused as raw materials or energy sources for other processes.

• In order to become greener, new chemical-engineering processes are being developed:
• Innovative catalysts are used to produce finished products in greater quantity with less by-product, and
• Biological processes are being used to produce desired products.

To minimize the consumption of increasingly scarce raw water, wastewater streams are now being treated to allow for maximum reuse within a facility. Chemical engineers are also working to develop imaginative technologies that will maximize the reuse of gaseous, liquid, and solid waste streams. All these innovations help minimize the amount of virgin raw materials, fuel, and power required in product manufacturing.