Systematic Design of Solvent Recovery Pathways: Integrating Economics and Environmental Metrics

Abstract

The increasing trend of solvent usage by chemical industries has caused an upsurge in hazardous waste solvents and, consequently, increased their toxicity potential within the environment. The increase in overall carbon and ecological footprints due to conventional waste handling techniques such as incineration and onsite and offsite disposal can hardly be overstated. Even though solvent recovery methods present a better alternative to these techniques, analysis is generally centered on economics. This paper presents a framework that evaluates the economic and sustainability metrics of solvent recovery processes. In the first approach, standalone software (SimaPro) was used to evaluate the impact of the recovery process. The framework was extended by incorporating the economics, Sustainable Process Index (SPI), and Emergy metrics. Thus, solvent recovery challenges have been transformed into a multiobjective optimization problem that is solved through superstructure and mixed-integer nonlinear programming techniques. The applicability of the framework is illustrated by two comprehensive case studies with varying complexities, and the results are compared with conventional methods. The results indicate that about 76–85% of the ecological and energy burden can be prevented if solvent recovery is the preferred option to incineration.