Focus on environment

Emissions of greenhouse gases and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) are becoming ever more tightly regulated as European legislation and the targets set under the Kyoto Protocol come into play.

Reducing VOC emissions is first and foremost a matter of good housekeeping — leak reduction, inventory control and so on — but for those solvent-using industries such as fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the problem is on a much larger scale.

Solvent recovery is an essential part of their processes and tightening legislation on emissions has resulted in a growing interest in cryogenic condensation systems.

In a similar vein, and for similar reasons of regulatory compliance, continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS) are now becoming commonplace on many plants. As with the cryogenic solvent recovery techniques, here are technological developments being driven environmental legislation.

However, for every ‘stick’ there is usually a ‘carrot’. Which takes us to emissions trading. The setting up of markets to trade CO2 emissions ‘credits’ should, in theory, enable the more environmentally-efficient operators to profit from their good husbandry by selling off surplus credits (essentially permission to pollute up to a certain level) to less efficient companies.

Of course, if the market price of those credits is such that the less efficient companies find it cheaper simply to buy credits rather than invest in improving their own plants’ performance, there is no real net gain in environmental protection. Unless, that is, the legislative ‘stick’ comes to the fore again and emissions targets are progressively strengthened all round.