Sustainable development of process facilities: state-of-the-art review of pollution prevention frameworks

Pollution prevention (P2) strategy is receiving significant attention in industries all over the world, over end-of-pipe pollution control and management strategy. This paper is a review of the existing pollution prevention frameworks. The reviewed frameworks contributed significantly to bring the P2 approach into practice and gradually improved it towards a sustainable solution; nevertheless, some objectives are yet to be achieved. In this context, the paper has proposed a P2 framework 'IP2M' addressing the limitations for systematic implementation of the P2 program in industries at design as well as retrofit stages. The main features of the proposed framework are that, firstly, it has integrated cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) tool with other adequate P2 opportunity analysis tools in P2 opportunity analysis phase and secondly, it has re-used the risk-based cradle-to-gate LCA during the environmental evaluation of different P2 options. Furthermore, in multi-objective optimization phase, it simultaneously considers the P2 options with available end-of-pipe control options in order to select the sustainable environmental management option.