Integrating Green Chemistry and Sustainable Engineering

This groundbreaking book covers the recent advances in sustainable technologies and developments, and describes how green chemistry and engineering practices are being applied and integrated in various industrial sectors. Over the past decade, the population explosion, rise in global warming, depletion of fossil fuel resources and environmental pollution have been the major driving force for promoting and implementing the principles of green chemistry and sustainable engineering in all sectors ranging from chemical to environmental sciences. It plays a growing role in the chemical processing industries. Green chemistry and engineering are relatively new areas focused on minimizing generations of pollution by utilizing alternative feedstocks, developing, selecting, and using less environmentally harmful solvents, finding new synthesis pathways, improving selectivity in reactions, generating less waste, avoiding the use of highly toxic compounds, and much more. In an effort to advance the discussion of green chemistry and engineering, this book contains 19 chapters describing greener approaches to the design and development of processes and products. The contributors describe the production of third generation biofuels, sustainable and economic production of hydrogen by water splitting using solar energy, efficient energy harvesting, mechanisms involved in the conversion of biomass, green nanocomposites, bio-based polymers, ionic liquids as green solvents, sustainable nitrogen fixation, bioremediation, and much more. The book aims at motivating chemists and engineers, as well as postgraduate and PhD students and postdocs to pay attention to an acute need for the implementation of green chemistry principles in the field of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, agriculture, environmental engineering, chemical processing and material sciences.