2020 Vision: Green, Safe, Sustainable—Part 1

What will green, safe, and sustainable look like in 2020? How will regulatory efforts and corporate policies influence manufacturing, cleaning, and contamination control? These questions have global and local impact, and the issues are difficult for any mere mortals to address. However, we asked the questions of people in manufacturing and in academia who are involved in critical cleaning and the impact of chemicals on society. In this series, we provide their insightful responses that reflect their expectations, wishes, and concerns.

Dynamic tension

“As a society, we are divided between wanting to get things done as quickly as possible and having a social conscience; this creates a dynamic tension,” says Anselm Kuhn, Manager at Finishing Publications, Stevenage, U.K.

We resonate with the concept of dynamic tension in manufacturing, and we would include factors such as maintaining production schedules, assuring product quality, minimizing risks to employees, and avoiding damage to the environment.

While we ourselves would wish for a holistic approach, the regulatory portion of this dynamic tension seems to be an inexorable trend to put more and more chemicals under regulatory scrutiny. John Burke, CMFS STLE Fellow and Global Director of Engineering Services at Houghton International in Valley Forge, Pa., predicts more “disappearing chemistries,” including boron, nonophenols, certain biocides, VOCs, and perhaps even biobased products like castor oil given “the possibility of worker exposure to ricin during harvest.”

Industrial Hygienist, Steve Derman, President of MediSHARE Environmental Health & Safety Services in Cupertino, Calif., discusses the implications of holistic versus more classic proscriptive regulation of the type sometimes referred to as command and control. From a sociologic perspective, Derman sees a desire to make regulations more holistic; however, “it’s a bit difficult to legislate more holistic activities. By regulating some items, you force changes in behavior.” Derman adds that while “from a business perspective, companies may respond to regulations, they might also respond to positive incentives, if there were any. I think if we are going to encourage businesses to change a chemical or to change a process or control a process, we have to encourage activities that don’t financially break the bank; and we want the change to work well.”

Cleaning chemicals—the process

Regulations may be concerned with chemicals; cleaning and minimizing contamination are processes. So, how do we bridge the gap between broccoli and hot fudge sundaes, between cleaning processes that are safe, green, and sustainable and cleaning processes that are cost-effective and work really well?

Chris Jones is Director – International Operations at Brulin & Company Inc., Indianapolis, Ind. Brulin produces aqueous cleaning agents that are used in critical manufacturing activities. Jones sees that the implication for cleaning will be “a push to develop approaches to more effectively address the way the cleaning process impacts and meshes with the entire manufacturing process. One factor is designing cleaning products that have functionally ‘greener’ characteristics, like longer bath life. A second aspect is helping those performing cleaning activities to use the product easily and correctly, and to control the cleaning process well.”

Cleaning—less water, less energy

“Almost every high-quality manufacturing process requires pure water somewhere; in California, we’re in a drought,” says Taoward Lee, Manager of Technology at Ecosystems Inc. in Costa Mesa, Calif. Ecosystems specializes in helping manufacturers produce high quality water. Lee sees a trend to reduced consumption by purifying and recycling water or re-using it in less critical processes.

Lee adds that another trend will be to conserve energy, with the goal of little by little using less and less energy to get better results. He adds that “just as you can recycle and reuse water, you can recycle and reuse energy. For example, process baths can be heated while making distilled water.” Lee sees more thoughtful overall process design as a key to reducing chemical consumption, water use, and energy use. “One way to reduce chemical consumption is to reduce dragout, capture the remaining dragout, and return it to the process immediately. This uses less chemical and keeps the rinses cleaner.”

“There is a trend to reduce the heat required for pretreatment prior to painting or coating,” says Lee. He adds that there may be limitations in lowering the temperature for cleaning processes because the cleaning process is related to the oils and soils. “Generally, we have to reach the melting point of the oil in order to remove it. We would have to change the melting temperature of the oil.”

Congruent chemistries

Burke sees congruent chemistries, chemicals that work well together, as another near-term approach to cleaning efficiency. Burke explains that typically, “we put chemicals on parts without considering how to clean them off. Now, people in the automotive field are demanding that metalworking fluids and cleaning agents work together so that they can wash the parts, and put the lubricants and cleaning agent back into the system with zero discharge—no waste treatment.” Burke explains that hydraulic oils and way oils would have to be reformulated to work within the system, adding that “while it’s already being done, it’s a growth area. In fact, 99% of people you ask probably won’t know what congruent chemistry means, and an engineer might say ‘I don’t care;’ but if you can reduce waste streams from 50,000 gallons per day to 1,500 gallons per day, you have an impact that is difficult to ignore.”

Bio-based

Bio-based cleaning agents and other process fluids can be one key to sustainability, with a few provisos.

“I would like to see industry return to the use of natural chemicals that can be grown,” says Jason Marshall, Director of the Cleaning Laboratory at TURI, Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI), at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Jones expects there to be increased restrictions or bans on formulation materials like surfactants; and more insistence on documented biodegradability.” Jones predicts that while the call for products with bio-based compounds is relatively small, that demand is likely to grow.

Burke explains that we will have to look at the entire lifecycle of the manufacturing process. His vision reaches to 10 years. He predicts that industry would continue to use mineral oil for several reasons. For one thing, “when bio-based vegetable oil is mixed with mineral oil, it cannot be recycled. Therefore, the value in the waste stream is lost.”

Burke sees industry “flipping from biodegradable process fluids to ultra-stable fluids that can be recycled over and over.” Burke explains that “it’s the only way to minimize waste streams; and it’s exactly the opposite to where we were in the 1970s. Instead, industry will want process fluids to go into the system and last forever.” Burke notes that the use of vegetable oil in manufacturing cuts into the food chain, adding that “that’s more of a moral analysis.”

However, Marshall points out that “we should not need to choose between food and manufacturing.” Marshall likes the idea of making cleaning products out of waste feedstock, or waste fuel, so that we are not offsetting food production to foster manufacturing products; “nothing should go into landfill.”

With that bit of food for thought, we invite you to use your imagination to design innovative approaches to making your critical cleaning processes more effective safer, and better for the environment, and, of course to cost less. No ideas yet? We’ll have more to chew on in Part 2.

Barbara Kanegsberg and Ed Kanegsberg (the Cleaning Lady and the Rocket Scientist) are experienced consultants and educators in critical and precision cleaning, surface preparation, and contamination control. Their diverse projects include medical device manufacturing, microelectronics, optics, and aerospace. Contact: info@bfksolutions.com

This article appeared in the October 2014 issue of Controlled Environments.