Manufacturing

Green Lab Best Practices Database Specialty Labs
1

Green Engineering Principles:

  1. Engineer processes and products holistically, use systems analysis and integrate environmental impact assessment tools.
  2. Conserve and improve natural ecosystems while protecting human health and well-being.
  3. Use life-cycle thinking in all engineering activities.
  4. Ensure that all material and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently safe and benign as possible.
  5. Minimize the depletion of natural resources.
  6. Prevent waste.
  7. Develop and apply engineering solutions while being cognizant of local geography, aspirations, and cultures.
  8. Create engineering solutions beyond current or dominant technologies; improve, innovate, and invent (technologies) to achieve sustainability.
  9. Actively engage communities and stakeholders in development of engineering solutions.

ACS’s modified 12 principles of Green Engineering:

  1. Inherent Rather Than Circumstantial – Designers need to strive to ensure that all materials and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently nonhazardous as possible.
  2. Prevention Instead of Treatment – It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it is formed.
  3. Design for Separation – Separation and purification operations should be designed to minimize energy consumption and materials use.
  4. Maximize Efficiency – Products, processes, and systems should be designed to maximize mass, energy, space, and time efficiency.
  5. Output-Pulled Versus Input-Pushed – Products, processes, and systems should be “output pulled” rather than “input pushed” through the use of energy and materials.
  6. Conserve Complexity – Embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment when making design choices on recycling, reuse, or beneficial disposition.
  7. Durability Rather Than Immortality – Targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal.
  8. Meet Need, Minimize Excess – Design for unnecessary capacity or capability (e.g., “one size fits all”) solutions should be considered a design flaw.
  9. Minimize Material Diversity – Material diversity in multicomponent products should be minimized to promote disassembly and value retention.
  10. Integrate Material and Energy Flows – Design of products, processes, and systems must include integration and interconnectivity with available energy and materials flows.
  11. Design for Commercial “Afterlife” – Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial “afterlife.”
  12. Renewable Rather Than Depleting – Material and energy inputs should be renewable rather than depleting.

Reblend your waste

Look to add waste from changeovers back into the final product at low concentrations providing the new final product continues to meet specifications. The active material from your waste should not just be thrown away.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

This article is a stub. You can help by expanding it. Get Involved!