Industrial metabolism of chlorine in a chemical industrial park: the Chinese case

This paper presents a general chlorine metabolic model at industrial parks' level and takes one chemical industrial park in China as a case study. The general metabolism model of chlorine in industrial parks consists of 4 subgroups. Subgroup-1 is mainly composed of industries utilizing NaCl as the major chlorine source. Subgroup-2 includes chemical industries with Cl-2 as the major chlorine source. Subgroup-3 uses HCl as the major chlorine source and subgroup-4 implies the effluent treatment engineering. The chlorine metabolic pattern illustrates the main flow routes of chlorine in chemical industrial parks and demonstrates that Cl-2 and HCl are the key nodes in these routes. The model is employed to investigate the Cl stream of a typical chemical park in China. The maximum flux route of chlorine is the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) production path: NaCl -> Cl-2 -> HCl -> PVC. The relatively low resource efficiency (RE) of chlorine for the whole park (55.47%) indicates huge chlorine losses during production, which may be due to the outflow of by-products and effluents containing Cl. Four scenarios, direct utilization of HCl, conversion of HCl, Cl- recycle and the integrated scenario, are proposed to raise the RE of the park, achieving the maximum rise of RE from 55.47% to 83.69%. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.