Key ChBE Concepts Related to “Creating Sustainable Communities”

ChBE majors who enroll in ChBE SLS-affiliated courses will learn to think in depth about the following important sustainable communities-related concepts and how to engage them as chemical and biomolecular engineers, especially by working in partnership with communities where chemical plants are sited:

1. Lifecycle Analysis (LCA): Chemical and biomolecular processes are part of larger systems that impact human communities and the natural environment from start to end –  from supply chain (input), to production, to use (output), to disposal. Impacts that are most typically considered are physical, such as soil contamination, atmospheric pollution or water quality. More recently, though, social impacts are also considered, through “Social LCA,” most notably to health, but also to other areas, such as “workers’ rights and safety, community building, living conditions, fair competition.”  Since all chemical processes produce and consume energy there is a natural link to concepts such as the social cost of carbon which can be used to condense climate impacts into an economic impact.  There are also quality of life indicators that can be used to translate particulate emissions into DALY’s and then into economic measures.

2. Health and Safety: Chemical and biomolecular processes can have serious impact on worker health and safety; the health and safety of the communities surrounding chemical plants; and communities and the natural environment far beyond plant boundaries (e.g., through pipeline and tank accidents), if safety measures are not appropriately designed and implemented.  The emphasis of chemical engineering design and operation is to avoid creating hazardous situations whenever possible and then designing safety systems to avoid uncontrolled releases when hazards are an inevitable part of the process design. Chemical engineers must also pay close attention to lab safety both in their undergraduate but also graduate labs and in their professional work environment where their own and their colleagues safety can be at risk due to failure to understand the safety issues of those environments.

3. Environmental Justice: Historically, chemical plants are located, and often clustered, in low income communities and communities of color, both within and outside the U.S. This makes Environmental Justice – or EJ – an important concept and movement for chemical and biomolecular engineers to understand and engage in. EJ is concerned with making sure that (a) no community takes on an unfair share of environmental burdens and (b) environmental benefits are shared in an equitable way regardless of race, class, gender, or orientation.

4. Green Chemistry & Engineering: Chemical products provide significant benefits to society but there has been an increasing recognition of the negative impact of chemical production and use.  This has lead to a strong growth in using “principles of green chemistry and engineering” to try to reimagine chemical products to reduce toxicity and manufacturing risks associated with solvents and reaction chemistries of the traditional industrial routes from petrochemical feedstocks and substitution with renewable feedstocks.

5. Modular Manufacturing and Decentralized Processing: The development of modular low-capital chemical processes through process intensification and photo/electrochemical technology can enable decentralized production of chemical products. The direct use of electrons and photons for chemical production challenges the traditional paradigm of thermally driven processing and may lead to fundamentally different ways of configuring the chemical production enterprise. These emerging technologies may lead to more sustainable chemical production by utilizing renewable electrical energy and/or reducing costs and emissions associated with transportation. Decentralized manufacturing and chemical processing may also have social impact by empowering communities to control their own production of chemical products.

SLS-Affiliated ChBE Courses

ChBE offers SLS-affiliated courses every semester. Affiliated courses include the following. Note that if there is an instructor’s name in parentheses, the course is only SLS-affiliated when taught by that instructor: