Air Pollution because of process industries

Being a chemical engineer, you must be aware of the hazards and outcomes of the unmanaged and poorly handled processes in process industries. One of the major disadvantages of these poorly handled chemical processes is the Air Pollution. However energy generation is also considered as the major source of the air pollution.

In air pollution, the air is contaminated with several unwanted substances, which produces direct measurable effect on receptors (receptor may be humans, animals, plants or environment). This situation becomes more dangerous when these substances react with other contents in the atmosphere and form other hazardous compounds, causing harmful phenomena like depletion of ozone layer, petrochemical smog, acid rains, or green house gases (generally known as global warming). We will discuss these phenomena later, in detail.

The original six criteria pollutants, documented by EPA (environmental protection agency) are SO2 (sulfur dioxide), NO2 (Nitrogen dioxide), CO (carbon monoxide), O3 (ozone), suspended particles and VOC (volatile organic compounds). As this is a serious issue against the global environmental protection, so EPA is trying to implement and make several changes in the clean air act.

The clean air act was first passed in 1956 by the parliament of UK, in response of the London smog 1952. This clean air act 1952 was used and effective till 1964, then there were several modifications in this act.

The 1970 clean air act required that EPA provide a safety margin to protect against hazardous air pollutants by establishing national emissions standards for certain sources.

This act was last amended in 1990, which contains national ambient air quality standards for pollutants which are harmful to receptors. This act identifies two types of national ambient air quality standards:

• Primary standards      : for public health protection.
• Secondary standards  : for public welfare protection.

However, it is also the duty of the process industries / organizations, to take serious steps to control air pollution. They must focus on the reduction of contaminant discharge

• by installing control equipments (scrubbers, gravity settling chambers, etc)
• by changing raw materials, operations, or modes of operations
• by diluting the discharge
• by dispersion of sources locations.

Out of all above, the installation of the pollution control equipments is the best option to go for. This is quite an expensive technique, but is very efficient and most of the industries are using these equipments to regenerate the chemicals from the waste stream, so that their process is highly optimized causing very less pollution.

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