Chemical Engineering Commons^™

Enhancing Sustainable Process Designs Through Strategic Material Utilization And Waste Minimization Approaches, John David Chea

Theses and Dissertations

Sustainability is a growing concern as resources are continually depleted for various applications without adequate renewal plans. The resulting impacts on the ecosystem, health, and resource circularity are often overlooked. This research analyzes improvement opportunities at each major stage in a product's life cycle. Raw material acquisition, product synthesis, process waste management, and the fate of a material in the end-of-life phases were examined. The viability of utilizing renewable resources has been demonstrated in this work by extracting bio-based chemicals from underutilized renewable resources at a commercial scale and transforming the extracted resources into polymeric materials. The optimization of raw …