Читать книгу Industrial Environmental Management - Tapas K. Das - Страница 27

Chemical process and product design engineers, environmental engineers, and consulting engineering firms can play a pivotal role as industries move toward the Zero Emissions or Zero Discharge paradigm, especially firms whose traditional niche has been to treat waste so that it is benign and acceptable for discharge. The role for these engineers in the twenty‐first century is to transform the effluent of one process to serve as the raw material for another process. The new role is not simply facilitating waste exchange; rather, the new jobs include the following:

 Assessing material flows through the economy and the use of raw materials, water, and energy

 Designing databases with a wider set of information about material flows and manufacturing processes

 Working with design firms to understand the production processes of the industries that produce the wastes

 Designing conversion processes

 Identifying purchasers for converted wastes

 Designing material transfer systems to carry wastes to industries that will use them as feedstock

 Identifying industrial clusters and understanding how to fit diverse industries into a successful industrial cluster

 Designing eco‐industrial parks and negotiating arrangements that are commercially sound and profitable, yet based on good personal relationships; voluntary, and yet in close collaboration with regulatory agencies

What this means for engineering firms is the need for a broader set of engineering skills and services. As can be seen, consulting engineering firms will find that achieving Zero Emissions entails expertise in areas that have not been part of engineering curriculum, or the professional engineer's exam.

Zero Emissions engineers need to be not only well trained in design for the environment, concurrent engineering, and industrial engineering but also be able to think and design outside the traditional boundaries of the factory to work in terms of industrial clusters.

Many of the skills and services enumerated above would be applicable to the development of an agro‐industrial cluster such as the one in Namibia, described in Mini‐Case Study 1.1.