Towards Zero-Waste Eco-Industrial Parks through Resource Integration

Climate change is a major threat and is a key priority in achieving the global goal of sustainability. The concept of circular economy can be applied to tackle this issue as it enables resource conservation and can be expanded to emission reduction. Carbon dioxide emissions are the primary contributors to the effect of climate change, of which the power and industry sectors combined account for most of the current global emissions. There has been an increased focus on the development of carbon capture utilization and sequestration (CCUS) systems to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. CCUS aims at reusing and utilizing carbon dioxide to produce value-added products. This can be incorporated into the resource integration (Ahmed et al. 2020) framework to identify materials that can be utilized to produce other valuable end products and at the same time evaluate the role of renewable energy and energy reuse. This will create an eco-industrial park, a modern sustainable and circular solution that incorporates the capture and utilization of emissions through integration. This work develops a methodology to design a carbon dioxide negative eco-industrial park that can utilize resources to produce value-added products. First, criteria are determined to identify the processes to be included in the park. Second, an integration model is utilized to achieve profitability and carbon dioxide emission targets. Then, the potential benefits of utilizing carbon dioxide emissions and natural and free resources (namely, air, seawater, and sunlight for energy) are also assessed. The park designed in this work was able to generate profits while being carbon neutral.

Ahmed R, Shehab S, Al-Mohannadi DM, Linke P. Synthesis of integrated processing clusters. Chem Eng Sci. 2020. doi:10.1016/j.ces.2020.115922