Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Process Systems Engineering (PSE ASIA)

25 - 27 June 2013, Kuala Lumpur.

Comparisons of Methods for Assessing

Environmental Safety of Chemical Processes
during Process Design
S. Abbaszadeh,a M. H. Hassim,a M. Hurmeb
a

Department of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM

Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
b
School of Chemical Technology, Aalto University, P.O. Box 16100, FIN-00076 Aalto,
Finland

Abstract
Despite major concern of industries on profitability, there has been growing awareness
on the importance of considering environmentally conscious design of new processes.
Consideration of environmental, health and safety aspects in the initial stages of
chemical process design will not only lead to safer and environmentally benign plants,
but overall cost reduction. The interest of this paper is on methods that consider
environmental impacts as part of chemical process hazards. Eight methods are reviewed
for their goal and scope, developer and considered aspects. The methods differ
significantly in the considered aspects and parameters, which consequently influencing
the way data is processed. The applicability of the methods with the environmental
friendliness definition from chemical process stand point is also explained. The paper
provides a reference for the comparison of the existing environmental assessment
methods targeting various stages of chemical process design. The review finds that
despite all the advantages of each of the methods, none is able to address all the
environmental aspects of a process. Also none provides assessment approach for
different plant stages. Therefore, further improvement of the assessment methods is
needed.
Keywords: Environmental assessment;
Environmentally benign process.

Design

stage;

Chemical

process;

1. Introduction
Chemical processes offer a varied collection of important products and materials
categorized from health care to transportation and food processing. Chemical industry is
an essential key to nations economic health and modern societies. However, the
industry is also a main source of pollution since it generates considerable amount of
waste and emissions to the environment (Pereira, 1999). The effort of incorporating
pollution prevention techniques into process design is not something new and dated
back to the 1970s. Till date, the most widely adopted strategy by process industries for
environmental protection is the end-of-pipe pollution control techniques, which revolve
around waste treatment, toxicity diminution and industrial discharge volume reduction.

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By using these add-on systems, hazards however still remain in the process and the
associated risks to the receptors can only be reduced through add-on counter measures
(Hassim and Hurme, 2010). Such strategy is costly as industries need to try different
new technologies to cope with the regulations (especially on discharges and emissions),
which are continuously getting stricter and stricter. Besides as mentioned earlier, the
strategy does not get rid of the problems at the root cause through hazards elimination
or reduction, but focuses on minimizing the impacts and probability of the unwanted
events. In contrary, the new pollution prevention techniques (known as clean
technology) have been later introduced to increase the environmental friendliness of
processes through prevention or elimination of intrinsic hazards arising from a process.
Such concept may offer more cost-effective and sustainable solutions compared to endof-pipe control methods.
Plenty of major decisions on process including raw materials, technologies and
operations, are made during the process development and conceptual design phase.
Based on the concept of inherent safety (Kletz, 1991), the best approach towards
designing an environmentally benign process is to consider the environmental aspect
early when developing a new process or retrofitting an existing one.
Inherent environmentally friendlier processes are those that have reduced or even
avoided hazards as well as inherently low levels of operational impacts (Gunasekera and
Edwards, 2006). Early hazards assessment poses a lot of advantages in a way that
inherent environmental friendly features can be adopted into the process with larger
degree of freedom and at lower costs. Despite the complications encountered due to
limited data availability, abundance of qualitative and quantitative methods have been
introduced for assessing the aspect at early process lifecycle phase. A number of
attempts have been made to analyze and classify the large variety of methods for
environmental assessment of chemical processes i.e. by Hertwich et al. (1997), Koller et
al. (2001) and Adu et al. (2008). The methods were reviewed from different viewpoints
including design and optimization of process, substance ranking, life cycle assessment
and environmental footprint. Even though extensive reviews have been done on
environmental assessment methods, similar works focusing on environmental safety are
still lacking. In this paper, environmental safety refers to the environmental- related
properties of chemical substances and process conditions (e.g. waste emissions and
discharges) due to normal, day-to-day operations. The focus of assessing such
properties is on chemical processes during the early design stage. This is the same as
inherent safety (Kletz, 1984) and inherent occupational health concepts (Hassim and
Hurme, 2010).
In this paper, eight of the existing methods for environmental assessment of chemical
process design are reviewed, critically summarized and compared qualitatively. The
methods are categorized based on several aspects including the specific aim and target
stage of assessment, set of environmental impact categories, considered parameters,
assessment approach as well as results presentation. The objective of this study is to
compare the applicability of the previous methodologies to assess environmental
friendliness of a process inherent level during early stages of design phase. The same
attempts have been done before for inherent safety and occupational health criteria.

Comparisons of methods for assessing environmental friendliness of chemical processes

during design
265

2. Methodology
2.1. Selection of methods
The index-based methods for environmental assessment during conceptual process
design were mostly developed based on the inherent safety concept and within the
limited data availability. Based on the criteria above, eight methods have been selected
and summarized in Table 1. The methods are mostly for early design stage i.e. R&D,
the rest are applicable for retrofitting of the existing plants i.e. GERA, MBEI. The main
interest here is on the former ones since those methods have higher application for
designing process with inherent environmentally friendliness features.
Table 1. Reviewed environmental assessment methodologies applicable in design stage.
Method

Year

Author/s

Aim

Design
stage

Environmental
hazard index (EHI)
Waste reduction
(WAR) algorithm

1997

Cave and Edwards

R&D

1999

Cabezas and Bare

To quantify environmental impacts as a

result of total loss of inventories
To quantify potential environmental impacts
based on pollution balance at steady state

Atmospheric hazard
index (AHI)

2003

Gunasekera and
Edwards

R&D

Integrated
environmental index
(IEI)
Global
environmental risk
assessment index
(GERA)
Inherent
environmental
toxicity index (IETI)

2004

Jia et al.

2004

Archour et al.

To quantify environmental impacts as a

result of total loss of inventories in
atmospheric media
To assess environmental performance with
additional
consideration
of
energy
consumption and resource conservation
To assess environmental impacts rising from
inlet/outlet streams as a result of daily
routine operation in different units

2006

Gunasekera and
Edwards

To estimate inherent environmental

friendliness of chemical plant in all air, soil
and aquatic media due to total loss of
contaminants

R&D

Technique for order

preference by
similarity to ideal
solution (TOPSIS)
Material balance
environmental index
framework (MBEI)

2009

Li et al.

Flowsheeting
stage

Flowsheeting
stage
Flowsheeting
stage

R&D
To estimate environmental impacts as a
result of total loss of inventories

2011

Torres et al.
To estimate environmental impacts as a
result of total loss of inventories

R&D and
preliminary
stages

2.2. Characteristics of the methods

Each selected method is studied in detail before comprehensive comparison can be
performed. First the categories for comparison are determined, which are the main goal
and scope of method, target application, required information, considered aspects, final
result presentation and method applicability for the inherent environmental benign-ness
assessment of chemical process under design.
2.3. Comparison of the methods
WAR estimates the potential environmental impacts based on pollution balance at
steady state in flowsheeting stage. The EHI, AHI, IETI and GERA estimate
environmental impacts as a result of chemical releases. Compared to the other methods
which are based on worst case scenario (total loss of inventory), GERA evaluates
environmental impacts due to normal operations. Except GERA and MBEI, the AHI,
IETI, EHI and WAR are all applicable specifically for the new chemical process design
in different stage of design. Some like AHI, EHI and TOPSIS are well suited with the
limited data accessibility during the R&D; some require more detailed data like
flowsheet i.e. WAR. Some can be used at different lifecycle stages and are applicable
for both new (in R&D and preliminary design stage) and existing process i.e. GERA,
MBEI.

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Moreover, four of the reviewed methods are computer-based approaches like WAR,
GERA, IEI, TOPSIS, MBEI. For instance, the WAR algorithm used Chemcad III
process simulator and the IEI used PRO/II simulator. Electronic chemical property
database as well as computer-aided tools are highly in need especially for assessment at
early design stage since abundant of processes need to evaluated within a very limited
time.
Different methods have their own unique consideration of assessment parameters.
Among the most common impacts evaluated are ozone depletion, global warming as
well as aquatic, terrestrial, and atmospheric toxicities.
The WAR algorithm offers minimization of environmental footprint in chemical
process. Despite offering a strong methodology for environmental evaluation, it is not
applicable in the R&D stage since a large amount of data is needed (i.e. mass balance).
The EHI on the other hand utilizes very limited data of raw material and reaction
chemistry only to rank the alternative routes by the environmental impact level. The
method considers terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems only due to total loss of
contaminant.
Even though the AHI method does not cover soil and water media, it does consider all
the typical five impact categories of toxicity, acidification, photochemical smog, ozone
depletion and global warming. Despite the advantages of the AHI and EHI methods,
their applicability to chemical process design is actually quite limited since they are
complicated and protracted. Later, the IETI as a combination of the AHI and EHI is
proposed to estimate inherent environmental friendliness of chemical plant more
comprehensively by including all the environmental media. Besides all the advantages
introduced by IETI it still needs improvements to include also the environmental
impacts due to daily routine operation in the plant.
The IEI method as a multi-criteria decision-making tool was developed in three steps 1) process environmental performance assessment (PEPA), 2) integrated environmental
index development and 3) analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The GERA utilizes data
from material safety data sheet (MSDS) and design principles of unit operations. In
addition, it also uses the same material scoring system as used in the national fire
protection association (NFPA) and hazardous material identification system (HMIS)
ratings. The TOPSIS as a decision making tool identified a set of optimal parameters for
designing an environmentally conscious design of chemical process at initial stage of
design. It comprises of three steps of model construction, model solution and model
strategy for design and optimization of chemical process based on green chemical
principles. MBEI framework evaluates environmental performance of a process based
on materials flows data. It can be used for both new processes at any stage of design as
well as retrofitting the existing plants.

3. Discussion and Conclusion

The comparison of the environmental assessment methods as presented in this paper
shows that the diversity of the methods has a good balance between simplicity and
complexity, depending on the goal of the particular method itself. The common feature
found from the reviewed methods is that they are mostly model-based approaches.

Comparisons of methods for assessing environmental friendliness of chemical processes

during design
267
Besides, all the eight methods have similar goal of early environmental hazard
assessment and prevention. However, all the reviewed methods were developed for
petrochemical processes and relevant plant industries. Most of them are applicable for
process design but offer different level of complexity.
Based on the previous reviews of the similar works, overall there is yet any method that
could assess environmental performance of a process comprehensively. In fact, the term
comprehensive itself is yet to be further discussed.
From the applicability for the inherent environmental benign-ness assessment plus the
results presentation standpoints, methods reflected different points. EHI estimated the
environmental hazard by evaluating the effects and exposures of the involved chemicals
in a route through specific environmental hazard index (SEHI). In AHI methodology the
routes with inherently environmentally hazardous properties indicated by higher value
of AHI can be identified and avoided. The method tends to be comprehensive but is
affected the method simplicity that is an essential factor for early design phase hazard
assessment. TOPSIS is purposely developed for the separation process and it cannot be
accountable for the whole process assessment. Apart from the complexity, the WAR is
more suitable for the design stage as it described the flow of materials and generation of
potential environmental impacts by defining nine possible environmental impacts
indices for each chemical presents in the process.
Since most of the index-based methods use additive based calculation, in which the total
index value of a process is calculated by summing up the hazards score of all sub
processes in the route, results from various case studies show that a process with higher
number of sub processes is always regarded as the more hazardous one. As mentioned
earlier, a higher score value represents a greater hazard level. Also based on the review
conducted, it seems that at the moment the methods available for a specific stage of
design phase are still lacking. Most claim to be applicable for design stage, but the point
is the design itself consists of several stages i.e. conceptual design, preliminary design,
basic engineering and detailed engineering. Each stage offers different amount and type
of process information, hence affecting the assessment approach and level of accuracy.
As a conclusion, apart from all the advantages and comprehensiveness of the existing
methods, none is able to address the overall aspects of environmental performance of
chemical processes, let alone specific method for a particular design stage. This paper
compares eight of the earlier methods in terms of their purpose of assessment and
process stage of application. In those works, comprehensiveness is compromised for
simplicity of the methods. To achieve a comprehensive yet simple method is actually
possible, providing that the method needs to be developed exclusively for specific stage
of the design phase and not claiming to be applicable throughout the whole design
phase, as what most of the previous works did. The review conducted in this work
somehow suggested that deeper study associated with environmental impacts
assessment of chemical processes particularly in specific stages of process design is
highly needed.

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