Recycle of low chemical potential substance
Introduction
Nowadays, with the rapid development of economy in China, serious disruption of the ecosystem has resulted from massive industrial production. Environmental pollution, depletion of resources, and shortage of energy are chief problems which hinder the economic development, threaten the state security, and disrupt the ecosystem. It is urgent to seek a new economic growth pattern which is environment-friendly and ensures a harmonious development between nature and human society, which means to develop circular economy. Circular economy is an economic development pattern, in which resources and energy can be used most effectively and the environment can be protected, and economic activities will be organized by taking “reduce, reuse, and recycle” as the principles. Its direct goal is to improve the utilization efficiency of resources and realize the ecological utilization of them (Feng, 2004).
During the development of the process industry supported by the technology, the linear non-circulation unidirectional development pattern causes most of the final process products to be low chemical potential substances, such as CaSO4, CO2, H2O, HCl, NaCl, CaCO3, industry lignin, and so on, which are difficult to be recycled. The disuse of all these substances leads to not only the environment pollution, but also the waste of resources. If the low chemical potential substances can be reasonably used as resources, we may not only solve the vital problems in our human's confrontation, such as the resources, the energy, the environment, the health, and so on, but also realize the sustainable development. The author puts forward a new mode to change the way of current industry resources utilization within the circular economy pattern by elaborating the theoretic foundations and the new direction of technology innovation in the recycle of low chemical potential substances.
Section snippets
The present situation of the low chemical potential substance utilization in China
The traditional linear unidirectional development pattern causes that a large number of low chemical potential substances have been generated. According to the statistics of China in 2004, it indicated that in the process of phosphoric acid production with the wet method, the total output of phosphorus gypsum (CaSO4) is 21 million tonnes, with the content of 4,120,000 tonnes of sulfur. In the industrial production of the cement plant and the petroleum refining plant as well as the combustion of
The theoretic foundations of the low chemistry potential substances recycle
The essence of chemical potential is the driving force of substance migration in phase equilibrium and chemical equilibrium (Cook and Dickerson, 1995). During the course of phase transition and chemical reaction, substance transferred from the high chemical potential side to the low chemical potential side. Low chemical potential substances are the product of phase transition or chemical reaction, and their common characteristic is relative stability, and most of them are difficult to be reused
Technology innovation of the recycle of low chemical potential substances
Realizing recycle of the low chemical potential substances not only need imitate the ecosystem, but also attach importance to use new technologies in the ecosystem. Application of modern science and technology, especially the ecology integration technology, can solve the problem of the low chemistry potential substances transformed to be the high chemistry potential substances through inputting the negative entropy, and it can not only increase the resources utilization efficiency, but also
Conclusions
It is not only necessary, but also theoretically feasible to recycle the low chemical potential substances. Exploiting and utilizing the ecology integration technology reasonably through the technology innovation, making “the vein” of material circulation in the ecology chain expedite, and constructing the integrated ecology industry system is the key to the low chemical potential substances recycle, which will enable the low chemical potential substances to be circulated in the process
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