Concerns about the future of the earth are growing due to an increase of problems related to the environment, the depletion of natural resources as well as the consequent social effects resulting from increased industrial activity. Consequently, the issue of Process Sustainability needs to be analysed, taking into account, process design and retrofit issues. In this respect, it is possible to define sustainability as a development strategy that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. One way to apply this strategy to the chemical and related industries is to consider redesign of the processes, generating new sustainable alternatives, where feasible. This redesign will have to integrate the economic, the environmental and the social issues into production and the supply chain in order to satisfy the feasibility (more sustainable) criteria. The objective of this paper is to present the development of a new process design (and retrofit) methodology, which allows the generation of more sustainable alternatives for any chemical processes in production or a new chemical process. This methodology proposes to supply the chemical industry a systematic and straightforward tool for process analysis that guides the user with the choice of best alternatives for process improvements. According to this methodology, the critical points of the process are determined using a set of mass and energy indicators (presented at AIChE Annual Meeting 2005). Through a sensitive analysis of these indicators, the methodology identifies the critical points of the process in terms of what should be done to improve/solve those problems. The choice of the best alternative is based on the values of the sustainability metrics, the indicator improvements and the safety index, which makes this methodology a very useful tool in the sustainable process design. For efficient application of this methodology, a software tool called Sustain Pro, has been developed. With this tool, the process analysis is carried out systematically and the analysis done very fast, allowing the setting of the design targets for achieving improved sustainability of the process. Sustain Pro allows the use of the indicator-based methodology to any new chemical process design or existing chemical process, given the design or operational data of the process (real or simulated plant-process data). The presentation will highlight the application of Sustain-Pro to an industrial process belonging to the Mitsubishi Chemical Group in Japan. The supplied process data has been analyzed and the critical points identified with respect to the indicators. This helped to define the design targets and the process (design) alternatives that can achieve them. Finally, the extension of the methodology to batch processes has been made and the main features of this extended methodology will also be presented. This extension has been possible by considering the sequence of batch operations needed to obtain a desired product as similar to the flowsheet for a continuous process. In both cases, material and energy are being handled through a sequence of operations. This analogy between the two design (retrofit) problems will be discussed and analysed together with the problems that can be solved through the extended methodology. In this way, the same methodology will be applicable to processes producing low-value bulk chemicals (where the cost of operation has significance in addition to environmental and other socio-economic-technical issues) as well as processes producing high-value speciality chemicals (where the time for production, waste of raw material have significance in addition to environmental and other socio-economic-technical issues).

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