Abstract
Among the major new technologies that have appeared since the 1970s, biotechnology has perhaps attracted the most attention. Biotechnology has proved capable of generating enormous wealth and of influencing every significant sector of the economy. Biotechnology has already substantially affected healthcare, production and processing of food, environmental protection and production of materials and chemicals. The achievements and future prospects are in sustainable production of goods and services, especially those that are derived at present mostly from the traditional chemical industry. In fact, the international scientific community, under the pressing demand for a green chemistry, is launching the input about the creation of a new industrial concept based on innovative industrial biotechnological approaches. To this aim, the concept of Integrated BioRefinery (IBR), defined as a scientific and technical platform through which the biomass, designed as waste products, are turned into fuels, energy and chemicals, such as basic chemicals, fine chemicals and specialties of biopolymers and bioplastics, through technologies and processes that produce minimal waste and have limited impact on the environment are becoming increasingly popular also in the Italian territory.
An IBR is a structure (or a network of systems) that integrates both biomass conversion processes and equipment to produce biofuels, energy and/or chemicals. In this perspective it is desirable the creation of an industrial concept ''bio-cluster", in which the exchange of material (flows) between different companies are promoted to transform a residue downstream of a plant in an up-stream of raw material for another industry.
Although the environmental and health risks posed by these new realities are expected to be lower than with traditional chemical and petrochemical plants, there is still a lack of information about safety aspects of these new generation plants. Existing lessons suggest that the development of effective, responsive and responsible safety standard can improve the trust of the public and affected industries in biotechnologies. The fist step should be replacing the current retrospective risk-based paradigm for governing biotechnology with a proactive safety paradigm. Safety principles, applied early in the design process, can benefit multiple stakeholders concerned with safety.
The aim of the present work is providing a tool for transparent development of proactive safety standards and it is a part of the project funded by the National Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (CCM) of the Italian Ministry of Health.
This paper presents an analysis of the unit operations and equipment of the main industrial biorefineries and some of process and occupational hazards are preliminarly discussed. Basing on a preliminary analysis of IBR installations, a substantial reduction of the environmental impact and an increase of both occupational and process safety is expected with respect to the most common chemical plants.
The use of biological agents has been identified as the main hazardous aspect involved in those processes.
