Enabling sustainable chemical manufacturing from product to industrial ecosystem

The chemical industry is important to global economic development but arouses severe environmental effects and safety risks. Many chemical manufacturers keep aggregating in chemical industrial parks (CIPs), which largely promote material efficiency, environment, and safety performance by systematic and sustainable measures. To deliberately and rationally examine such evolution can help identify trackable development paradigms from forerunners and inspire followers to accelerate and maintain sustainability. This study defines a 3-stage evolutionary model of chemical manufacturing from separate production to an industrial ecosystem by analogizing the evolution of ecosystems and applies it to a typical chemical industry-intensive area where a 100-billion-CNY scale CIP locates. Corresponding to the model, the development of the chemical industry in the area can be divided into 3 stages: the emergence and development of chemical manufacturers (1979–1997), the establishment and expansion of the CIP (1998–2012), and the transformation to the industrial ecosystem (2013–now). The model is proven robust due to the same evolutionary tendency and attributes in practice as the model depicts. Five innovations undertaken in the practical evolution are summarized as references to promote the eco-transformation of CIPs, including (1) material and energy flow control, (2) green networking of supply chains, (3) reaction-engineering coupling industrialization, (4) reduction and resourcization of dilute acid and by-product salt, and (5) inherent safety improvement of whole-process chemical manufacturing. Further, the study analyzes that the driving force from Stage I to Stage II is simply economic benefits, but from Stage II to Stage III is a mixture of environmental requirements, safety production requirements, and economic benefits. Besides chemical manufacturing, the study explores a new theoretical perspective to present the general processes of process manufacturing development. It furthers the study of sustainable chemical manufacturing and profoundly influences eco-transformation practices.