School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering

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Green Engineering and Industrial Ecology

Green Engineering and Industrial Ecology brings together the quantification of environmental impacts, and guides industrial facilities in reducing these. The research includes cradle-to-grave analyses, including solid, liquid and gaseous emissions to determine environmental hotspots, provide improvement scenarios and determine other engineering solutions to improve our world.

While sustainability has many buzzwords, the research to be undertaken here aims to move beyond words and provide real solutions.  While these are primarily engineering based, the work will also include economic optimisation, societal considerations and planetary wellbeing.

The main tools used include:

  • Life Cycle Assessment (incl. water & carbon footpringing)?
  • Material flow analysis ?
  • Cost benefit analysis?
  • Hotspot analysis?
  • Biomimicry?
  • Industrial Symbiosis?
  • Life Cycle Costing?
  • Techno economic analysis?
Vision

To be the premium industrial ecology and green engineering research hub in Africa

Mission

To deliver the world-class industrial research needed to provide a sustainable future for all.

Industrial Ecology (IE)

Industrial Ecology incorporates many tools that quantify the environmental impact due to industrialisation. These include Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Material Flow Analysis (MFA), Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) and more recently, Circular Economy (CE). Additionally, Life-cycle Assessment (LCA), Carbon Foot printing (CF) and Water Foot printing (WF) form part of this suite of tools. Current research at WITS already looks at these.

Green Engineering (GE)

Green Engineering aims at using engineering approaches to look at ways of designing and improving industrial processes.  From industrial ecology findings, green engineering provides 12 steps on how to increase the sustainability of a process. These include resource reduction, life cycle thinking, waste prevention and other holistic solutions. Therefore, the two approaches can work together and thus lead to a single goal of reduced environmental impact.

  1. Inherent Rather Than Circumstantial
  2. Prevention Instead of Treatment
  3. Design for Separation
  4. Maximize Efficiency
  5. Output-Pulled Versus Input-Pushed
  6. Conserve Complexity
  7. Durability Rather Than Immortality
  8. Meet Need, Minimize Excess
  9. Minimize Material Diversity
  10. Integrate Material and Energy Flows
  11. Design for Commercial "Afterlife"
  12. Renewable Rather Than Depleting
网易体育
Associate Professor

Prof. Kevin Harding
E-mail: Kevin.Harding@wits.ac.za 

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