Tracking chemical releases in wastewater systems: An integrated plant-wide model for publicly owned treatment works.

Publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) provide a vital service in treating wastewater from rural, urban, and industrial sources. The inflow of industrial wastewater to POTWs introduces a complex mixture of conventional and emerging contaminants, creating challenges for effective treatment and posing potential environmental and health risks. This study presents ChemTEAPOTW, a Python-based simulation model developed to track and estimate the fate and transport of chemicals of concern (CoC) in POTWs while also integrating inhalation and dermal occupational exposure pathways.

An End-of-Life Plastic and Additive Flow Tracker Tool for Scenario Forecasting.

Plastics are widely used for their affordability and versatility in various applications. However, the end-of-life (EoL) management stage can often lead to the release of hazardous chemical additives and degradation products into the environment, which leads to ecological and human exposure risks. The increasing demand for plastics is expected to escalate the frequency of material releases during plastic EoL management activities, creating a challenge for policymakers, consumers, manufacturers, and communities to ensure proper material segregation, reuse, recycling, and disposal.

Exploring automated tracking of chemicals through their conditions of use to support life cycle chemical assessment.

Modeling the fate of chemicals across their life cycle when considering all potential uses can be challenging because of the data gaps arising from issues like confidential business information (data accessibility) and complex processing schemes (involvement in formulations, reactions, and separations) across multiple industries, products, and applications. Thus, assessing chemicals for safety and/or sustainability requires developing an extensive knowledge of chemical releases along the various conditions of use (CoU) to identify potential impacts on human health and the environment. The first step in this process is mapping the flow of a chemical throughout its various downstream uses, which can be time-intensive.

Regression tools for chemical release modeling: An additive manufacturing case study.

Chemical release data are essential for performing chemical risk assessments to understand the potential exposures arising from industrial processes. Often, these data are unknown or unavailable and must be estimated. A case study of volatile organic compound releases during extrusion-based additive manufacturing is used here to explore the viability of various regression methods for predicting chemical releases to inform chemical assessments.

Material Flow Analysis and Occupational Exposure Assessment in Additive Manufacturing End-of-Life Material Management.

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers a variety of material manufacturing techniques for a wide range of applications across many industries. Most efforts at process optimization and exposure assessment for AM are centered around the manufacturing process. However, identifying the material allocation and potentially harmful exposures in end-of-life (EoL) management is equally crucial to mitigating environmental releases and occupational health impacts within the AM supply chain.

A generic scenario analysis of end-of-life plastic management: Chemical additives.

Plastic growing demand and the increment in global plastics production have raised the number of spent plastics, out of which over 90% are either landfilled or incinerated. Both methods for handling spent plastics are susceptible to releasing toxic substances, damaging air, water, soil, organisms, and public health. Improvements to the existing infrastructure for plastics management are needed to limit chemical additive release and exposure resulting from the end-of-life (EoL) stage.

Development of an Interactive Software Tool for Designing Solvent Recovery Processes.

Solvents are used in chemical and pharmaceutical industries as a reaction medium, selective dissolution and extraction media, and dilution agents. Thus, a sizable amount of solvent waste is generated due to process inefficiencies. Most common ways of handling solvent waste are on-site, off-site disposal, and incineration, which have a considerable negative environmental impact.

Systems level roadmap for solvent recovery and reuse in industries.

Recovering waste solvent for reuse presents an excellent alternative to improving the greenness of industrial processes. Implementing solvent recovery practices in the chemical industry is necessary, given the increasing focus on sustainability to promote a circular economy. However, the systematic design of recovery processes is a daunting task due to the complexities associated with waste stream composition, techno-economic analysis, and environmental assessment.

Efficient UV Filter Solubilizers Prevent Recrystallization Favoring Accurate and Safe Sun Protection.

Sun protection is a global concern, and maximizing sunscreen stability and efficacy depends partially on the prevention of UV filters recrystallization. We aimed to study the efficacy of hydrophobic solubilizers in preventing the recrystallization of solid hydrophobic UV filters in predissolutions, sunscreen formulations, and during simulated human use. Recrystallization of UV filters induced by ultrasonication, temperature variation, or simulated human application was analyzed by different methods.