Methods and tools for sustainable process design

• Chemical engineering contributes to degrading ecosystems that sustain human well-being.
• Sustainable process design accounts for life cycle environmental impacts.
• Recent advances consider multiple objectives, and social aspects.
• Shortcomings include their inability to account for the full life cycle.
• Another shortcoming of SPD is ignorance of the role and status of ecosystems.

After overcoming its earlier denial of negative environmental impacts, the chemical industry has been working toward enhancing its sustainability. Early efforts focused on reducing pollution from individual processes, while today, the focus is on reducing impacts throughout the life cycle. Current methods for sustainable process design solve large multiobjective optimization problems, and attempt to consider economic, environmental and social aspects. This paper provides an overview of recent developments in sustainable process design and its applications. These methods use the latest advances in process systems engineering, but are lagging in their use of advances in Sustainable Engineering. More work is needed for considering impacts over the full life cycle boundary, and to ensure that sustainable designs do not exceed nature's capacity to provide the needed ecosystem goods and services.