China goes green: cleaner production of chemicals

The effort that China is making for cleaner production of chemicals especially based on technology innovations of green processing and synthesizing methods, is reviewed. An example is the rapidly expanding chlor-alkali industry in China, which manufactures a large volume of products of caustic soda, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), etc. With a distinct difference from conventional technologies, a series of novel processes are under investigation, both in academic research and in industrial demonstrations, such as clean coal conversion to acetylene using thermal plasma, mercury free catalysis to synthesize vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) and a plasma-assisted gas-solid contacting process to make chlorinated PVC (CPVC). All efforts are directed to improving the process efficiency, saving the materials and energy cost, and accordingly to reducing the emission/disposal of waste gases, liquids and solid residues. We try to address the significance of technology innovations to drive the industry reformation, in order to fully update the outdated processes with heavy pollution and energy consumption, to the state of the art green process and synthesis techniques.