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• Europe Eyes Plastic Recycling Efforts

  By Seán Ottewell, Editor at Large

  By 2030, the European Union (EU) wants all plastic packaging to be reusable, or recycled in a cost-effective manner. By the same year, half of all plastics waste generated in Europe should be recycled — aided by a four-fold increase in sorting and recycling capacity from a 2015 baseline. This is…

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• Tips To Maximize Safety Compliance

  By Mark Sen Gupta, Research Director, ARC Advisory Group

  In today’s chemical and other process plants, complying with safety standards requires more than just installing a certified safety instrumented system (SIS). Full compliance requires ensuring safety on a continuous loop-by-loop basis. SIS users perform some type of hazard and risk analysis…

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• Energy Saver: Why Continue To Do That?

  By Alan Rossiter, Energy Saver Columnist

  My jaw dropped and I broke into a cold sweat as I stared in shock and disbelief. When I finally regained the power of speech, I stammered to the young process engineer beside me, “Why do you do THAT!”She looked a little startled, but then shrugged her shoulders and said, “That’s the way we…

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• Predictive Maintenance Efforts Boast Uneven Success

  By Seán Ottewell, Editor at Large

  Online polling conducted by CP late last year shed some light on the success of plants in achieving predictive maintenance. While more than a quarter of respondents said their sites had attained high or very high success, a larger number reported only moderate success, and over 15% called success…

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• Political Turmoil Muddies Regulatory Moves

  By Lynn L. Bergeson

  2019 started with a political bang. The President’s decision to allow a partial government shutdown in the absence of funding for the “wall” will continue to inspire federal administrative and regulatory havoc for months to come. This is particularly true of the U.S. Environmental Protection…

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• Take Some Basic Steps With A Caustic System

   We circulate 50% caustic through the tubes of a vertical 1-1 shell-and-tube condenser using 50% steam reduced from 400-psig steam. The exchanger contains 60 tubes, each ½-in. diameter with 0.083-in. walls, but 20 have been blocked off. The caustic enters the bottom of the exchanger and, after…

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