Andres Malcolm

Optimal waste reduction and investment planning under uncertainty

Ever-changing production campaigns complicate the management of recovery and treatment options for unavoidable effluents at pharmaceutical plants. Each campaign produces large amounts of by-products differing in their number, amount as well as composition. Future business strategies designed to address changing market demands add uncertainty to this already challenging design problem. In such a dynamic and uncertain environment, the selection of operating policies as well as decisions to support future business operations by plant investments such as new reactors and separators is a formidable task. This paper will introduce a systematic planning methodology for obtaining long-term waste management strategies for entire batch manufacturing sites. Rigorous modeling of future business and regulatory changes will allow plant managers to assess their long-term monetary, infrastructural and ecological impact. The methodology will be illustrated with the help of quasi industrial case studies.

Optimal regulations for sustainable chemical manufacturing

Environmental regulations typically follow a command-and-control approach mandating the installation of state-of-the-art abatement technology and imposing hard emission thresholds. However, this type of regulations does not encourage process improvement and technological research to reduce emissions. In contrast, market-based environmental regulations stimulate continued improvement of cleaner manufacturing practices by creating economic incentives for sustained emission reduction. This paper aims at furnishing regulators and manufacturers with a tool to assess the impact of future regulatory scenarios using realistic chemical engineering models of pollution abatement operations.