Sustainability and Environment

Sustainability and Environment Key Points:

• Over the past 100 years we've seen many resources that have been used at unsustainable rates. This same pattern can be seen with lithium and in particular lithium battery recycling has not been economically viable and so we are not using lithium sustainable currently?  Current battery recycling practices are to remove the copper, cobalt as they are more economically viable and leave the lithium as a slag which is dumped. 
• Our biggest issue here for humans is human nature. We've seen it with climate change, we always wait until the last second to make changes.  Resources are finite, nothing on Earth is infinite. 
• We are aware of the environmental implications that climate change has and it's inevitable that we're going to see the world changed drastically in the next 80 years. 
• Achieving a sustainable future for these processes means addressing the entire asset or supply chain rather than focusing specifically on the product. This is what equitable future means. 
• The intense strain that we're putting other species on this planet is not only increasing year by year as the population grows consumption increases and our finite resources are being used up and discarded. 
• This as a challenge that undermines the very definition of global security and the possibility to thrive over the next century. 

• So, what do we hope that 2100 is going to look like? We want global warming to be non-existent. We hope that the global average temperature is no longer increasing every year and that sustainability is one of the first factors that we take into consideration every time that we start a new project, a new process or new production. 
• Chemical Engineers by our nature will try to find a solution to climate change, since we first found out about the problem objectively. When we look at the Earth as a system and a set of subsystems the idea of a carbon negative cycle becomes a challenge. Recent examples in technology included carbon capture sequestration and carbon capture utilization, which have entirely disrupted the carbon markets.  We have examples where carbon capture sequestration injects carbon dioxide back into the earth. Electro chemical processes converts carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals such as carbon monoxide formic acid and methane inching us closer to the idea of a circular economy. 
• Economic incentives for companies to research and develop processes and specific technologies will be needed.  Other alternative of options will the introduction of legislature such as the carbon tax to give emissions a price point and this forces companies to adopt the green technology challenge. 
• There are two ways Chemical Engineers approach solutions to sustainability challenges, which are either from a new process design perspective involving changing the process to reduce or reuse waste and this will involve a shift in perspective from the entire chemical engineering design.  The second way is to retrofit circular model solutions to existing processes.  
• Both approaches obviously have large economic aspects, which require policy changes to drive the transitions.  
• Heading into the future as graduate chemical engineers about to enter the workforce it is obvious that we carry a great deal of social and environmental responsibility.   
• The challenges and solutions that we've presented to you today are, you know, to say the least ambitious. To even get to 2100, we to get through the next critical 10 to 15 years and therefore we need a much stronger education of politicians and policymakers on the scale of the challenges and technological options that offer a solution if we do not do this we will continue to spiral towards an unpredictable resource-less future. 
• The goal of sustainability not only requires new technologies to better utilize our resources, but also provide solutions for recycling spent resources and waste that is currently produced at preposterous levels to enable transitions to more sustainable world, hopefully we will ultimately see end of product lifestyle cycles that end up in waste tips. Chemical engineers should already be planning for this task.