A data engineering framework for on-site end-of-life industrial operations

Sustainable initiatives for converting end-of-life (EoL) material flows into feedstocks would make a crucial contribution towards protecting our environment and mitigating the negative impacts of anthropogenic activities. Chemical flow analysis enables decision-makers to identify potential environmental releases and exposure pathways at the EoL stage and, therefore, improves the estimation of chemical exposure. Certain industrial facilities apply on-site pollution abatement operations, thereby constituting nodes of the chemical EoL management chain that can be evaluated and improved to enable greater circularity of materials. This work enhances and extends a recently published EoL data engineering framework by using publicly-available databases, data- driven models, and analytic hierarchy approaches to track chemicals, estimate releases, and potential exposure pathways at on-site industrial pollution management operations. The extended framework develops pollution abatement unit (PAU) technologies and estimates their efficiencies, chemical releases, exposure media, operating expenses, and capital expenditures. Relevant case studies based on the food and pharmaceutical industry sectors illustrate the application of the framework for chemical flow allocation and analysis of a chemical of concern and the benefits of integrating and extending the framework with data-driven and multi-criteria decision-making models. The results show how the enhanced framework designs and evaluates PAU technology systems for managing EoL chemical flows and provides release inventories and pathways for conducting chemical risk evaluation and exposure assessment of potential on-site EoL scenarios.