Author: Muhammad Ahmad

Recovery of wastes from agro‐industries is an extremely promising aspect of Zero Emissions. This project focuses on recovering all of the solid, liquid, gaseous, and thermal wastes from the Golden Hope Plantation in Malaysia, the largest oil palm plantation in the world. With the commitment of Meta Epsi, a large engineering group with substantial interests… Continue reading MINI‐CASE STUDY 1.3 RECOVERY OF WASTES FROM PALM OIL EXTRACTION YIELDS HIGH RETURN ON INVESTMENT

As the ZD mission gains currency, new opportunities are revealed – to provide cost‐saving new design applications, to design new product lines, and to win new customers. These opportunities include the following: Providing Return on Investment A simple economic metric, return on investment (ROI) is a quick measure of when an item will pay for… Continue reading Opening New Opportunities

Designing ZD systems requires an expansion of the focus and outputs of the traditional design engineer. Concurrent engineers need to incorporate design for the environment. Industrial engineers need to think in terms of industrial clusters. Environmental engineers need to understand upstream processes better so that they can develop designer wastes. Environmental engineers also need to… Continue reading In the Full ZD (Emission) Paradigm

DaimlerChrysler put in operation ZLD systems of two kinds. The first uses reverse osmosis (RO) to produce a concentrate of total dissolved solids (TDS), which is sent to a large evaporator and eventually on to a lagoon or solar evaporator pond. Used in dry, arid areas of low elevation, this system is frequently found in… Continue reading System Design

Consultants can help managers cut costs and create new values by instituting real‐time monitoring and eliminating inefficiencies in the use of resources all along a product’s life cycle. These inefficiencies include incomplete utilization of material and energy resources, poor process controls, product defects, waste storage costs, discarded packaging, costs passed on to consumers for pollution… Continue reading Improved Processes

During transitional stages, existing industries can be identified as potential members of a cluster if minimal design engineering can make them compatible and most of the transfers of materials are occurring in a more basic commodity form, rather than as “designer wastes.” Once Zero Emissions has been incorporated at the drawing board level, facilities can… Continue reading New Technologies and Materials

One critical component of the industrial ecology paradigm is dematerialization. Dematerialization means using less material to make products that perform the same function as predecessors. Sometimes this means smaller or lighter products, but other aspects can include increasing the lifetime of a product or its efficiency. The net effect is a reduction in overall resource… Continue reading Dematerilization

A critical element of an interim strategy is enhanced recovery. This can be approached from two directions: reuse of products and recycling of materials. Reuse of products includes return, reconditioning, and remanufacturing. The energy required for reuse and recycling is one of the key factors determining recoverability of a product. The closer the recovered product… Continue reading Recycling of Materials and Reuse of Products

The shift toward a ZD culture, especially in a world dominated by industrial ecology, will see the development of new products, services, and industries. Our global economic system depends on extracting massive quantities of materials from the environment – after extraction and processing, the “annual accumulation of active materials embodied in durables, after some allowance for discard… Continue reading Making the Transition

So‐called designer wastes can serve as direct feedstock to another sector, or, if properly processed through a conversion technology, as processed feedstock. If the beer industry for example, used a sugar‐based cleanser instead of a caustic cleanser for its bottle‐washing process, the discharge water could serve as a direct feed to fish ponds, without needing… Continue reading Designer Wastes