Hazardous emissions monitoring and control

There is an increasing awareness in society of the need to protect our fragile environment. Meeting environmental requirements is recognised as one of the six 21st century business drivers for automatic control. Chemical companies, for example, use automatic control to minimise waste production because of increasing prohibitions against discharge and/or disposal of toxic substances. New plants are moving towards a “zero-discharge” concept [1]. In a recent report [2], greater emphasis on automatic control is suggested as a technological response of both the speciality chemicals and pharmaceutical sub-sectors to key business drivers up to 2015. This contribution reports on recent developments in the monitoring and control of hazardous emissions.