Environmental and Process Engineering Research Group, Department of Chemical and Environmental Process Engineering, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Műegyetem Rkp. 3, H-1111, Budapest, Hungary.
Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering, Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Technical University of Denmark, Bygningstorvet, Building, 115, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
J Environ Manage. 2023 Nov 1;345:118593. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.118593. Epub 2023 Jul 11.
Recycling and disposing wastewater from the pharmaceutical industry are of utmost importance in mitigating chemical waste generation, where unmanaged hazardous waste fluxes could cause massive environmental damage. Air stripping, steam stripping, distillation, and incineration offer significant emission reduction potentials for pharmaceutical applications; however, selecting specific process units is a complicated task due to the high number of influencing screening criteria. The mentioned chemical processes are modelled with the Aspen Plus program. This study examines the environmental impacts of adsorbable organic halogens (AOX) containing pharmaceutical process wastewater disposal by conducting life cycle impact assessments using the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), IMPACT World + Endpoint V1.01, and Recipe 2016 Endpoint (H) V1.06 methods. The results show that the distillation-based separation of AOX compounds is characterized by the most favourable climate change impact and outranks the PEF single score of air stripping, steam stripping, and incineration by 6.3%, 29.1%, 52.0%, respectively. The energy-intensive distillation technology is further evaluated by considering a wide selection of energy sources (i.e., fossil fuel, nuclear, solar, wind onshore, and wind offshore) using PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) analysis combined with multi-criteria decision support to determine the most beneficial AOX disposal scenario. The best overall AOX regeneration performance and lowest climate change impact (7.25 × 10 kg CO-eq (1 kg purified wastewater)) are obtained by supplying variable renewable electricity from onshore wind turbines, reaching 64.87% carbon emission reduction compared to the baseline fossil fuel-based process alternative.
回收和处理制药工业废水对于减轻化学废物产生至关重要，因为管理不善的危险废物通量可能会造成大规模的环境破坏。空气汽提、蒸汽汽提、蒸馏和焚烧为制药应用提供了显著的减排潜力；然而，由于影响筛选标准数量众多，选择特定的工艺单元是一项复杂的任务。所提到的化学过程使用 Aspen Plus 程序进行建模。本研究通过使用产品环境足迹（PEF）、IMPACT World + 终点 V1.01 和配方 2016 终点（H）V1.06 方法进行生命周期影响评估，考察了含有可吸附有机卤化物（AOX）的制药工艺废水处理的环境影响。结果表明，基于蒸馏的 AOX 化合物分离在气候变化影响方面表现出最有利的特征，分别比空气汽提、蒸汽汽提和焚烧的 PEF 单项得分高出 6.3%、29.1%和 52.0%。通过使用 PESTLE（政治、经济、社会、技术、法律、环境）分析结合多标准决策支持来考虑广泛的能源选择（即化石燃料、核能、太阳能、陆上风力和海上风力），对能源密集型蒸馏技术进行了进一步评估，以确定最有利的 AOX 处理方案。通过从陆上风力涡轮机供应可变可再生电力，获得了最佳的整体 AOX 再生性能和最低的气候变化影响（7.25×10kg CO-eq（1kg 净化废水）），与基于化石燃料的基线工艺替代方案相比，减排了 64.87%的碳排放。
