Recycle of low chemical potential substance

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2006.10.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Circular economy and eco-industry are effective ways to solve sustainable development problems on resources, environment and economy. Starting from the large quantity, but low utilization of low chemical potential substance produced in China, the author points out the traditional industry development pattern in China is unsustainable and that it results in the depletion of available resources, and polluted environment, etc. Concerning the development pattern of linear economy in the process industry, the author puts forward a new mode for resources utilization—recycle of low chemical potential substance from the theoretic foundations and technological innovation, illustrates the natural science foundation and analyzes the recycle process of low chemical potential substances by giving the recycle of several typical low chemical potential substances as examples.

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

References (16)

  • K. Klier

    Methanol synthesis

    Adv Catal

    (1982)
  • P.H. Abelson

    A third technological revolution

    Science

    (1998)
  • G. Cook et al.

    Understanding the chemical potential

    Am J Phys

    (1995)
  • Z.J. Feng

    Introductory remarks of circular economy

    (2004)
  • F. Hine et al.

    Bench scale experiment of recovery of chlorine from waste gas

    J Electrochem Soc

    (1984)
  • Jin Y, Hu SY. Engineering science foundation of circular economy. The nation circular economy work meeting; 2004. p....
  • Z.L. Jin et al.

    The research progress of decomposing water to produce hydrogen with light catalysis

    J Mol Catal

    (2004)
  • X.S. Li et al.

    Carbon as an intermediate during the carbon dioxide reforming of methane over zirconia-supported high nickel loading catalysts

    Catal Lett

    (1999)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (11)

  • Pathways towards regional circular economy evaluated using material flow analysis and system dynamics

    2020, Resources, Conservation and Recycling
    Citation Excerpt :

    Researchers began to think about how to switch from linear economy mode to a dynamic closed-looped system from an operational sense, and put forward a new CE mode with various socio-environmental implications, intending to achieve green development from production and consumption. During this period, some research explored the internal relationship between the ecological environment and the development of CE at different levels (Mo et al., 2009; Wen et al., 2007; Gibbs, 2010; Mirata, 2004). In Germany, the CE concept was introduced into environmental policy to address issues related to the consumption of raw materials and natural resources (Winans et al., 2017).

  • Eco-innovation in the transition to a circular economy: An analytical literature review

    2016, Journal of Cleaner Production
    Citation Excerpt :

    The need for novel management practices in the production process is stressed, i.e. production needs to be organised more broadly, so that it transcends the linear input-to-output sequence (Jones et al., 2013). Technology-driven EI is considered as an enabler of new ways of reusing and recycling substances, giving them other industrial applications (Wen et al., 2007). However, the CE is more than just about re-engineering existing processes (i.e. incremental change of existing components); importantly, it is also about re-wiring (i.e. changing the architecture of) the whole system of supply and demand.

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text