EDITORIAL
Environmental Progress Expands Focus on Energy and Sustainability Martin Abraham Dean, College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio 44555;
[email protected] (for correspondence) Published online 4 March 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ep.10266
Since taking over as the new editor back in April of last year, I have been involved in numerous discussions with the Environmental Division of AIChE, the publications committee, and other AIChE members regarding a modification to the scope of Environmental Progress. We have agreed to expand the scope of the journal to better accommodate all of the activities that now fall under the ‘‘environmental’’ mantle. The changes represent evolutionary growth for our journal, which we hope will continue to keep us fresh and relevant to your needs. Over the past several years, Environmental Progress has moved from the original focus of end-ofpipe treatment to broader environmental issues including fate and transport, air pollution modeling, and more recently, issues of sustainability. This change has come about simultaneously with the expanded interest in these topics by the chemical engineering community. Today, sustainability is a key element of environmental management, as we look to minimize waste generation and prevent the emission of potentially harmful species into the environment. Within our own coverage, the emphasis has always been on environmental sustainability, including critical discussions of product life cycle, solvent minimization, green engineering, and renewable materials. For example, the current issue includes several papers that cover sustainability topics, and this is clearly an increasing subject of interest for our contributors and we hope, our readers. Over the last few years, the issues of environment have become highly intertwined with issues of energy. Recognition of CO2 emissions as a leading Ó 2008 American Institute of Chemical Engineers
Environmental Progress (Vol.27, No.1) DOI 10.1002/ep
cause of global climate change leads the enlightened chemical engineer, and those with an environmental focus, to more carefully look at their energy source to determine the full life cycle environmental implications of their product or process. Chemical engineers must clearly be at the forefront of alternate energy technologies, renewable fuels, and energy efficiency. Growing from our interest in sustainability, we have the skills to evaluate the impacts of converting corn to bioethanol, growing soybeans for producing biodiesel, or alternatively, understanding the true impact of increasing the switchgrass ‘‘crop’’ so that we can produce cellulosic ethanol, or interpreting the life cycle impacts of changes to our processes that reduce energy consumption. And in each of these cases, the discussion comes back to the impacts of the emissions on the environment and the cost of implementing these new technologies—two areas that have always been at the heart of Environmental Progress. Given our historic interest in these areas and the tremendous current interest in energy technologies, it is only natural for Environmental Progress to serve as the home for energy research within the stable of AIChE publications. Since we already publish a substantial number of articles with energy content, the publications committee approached me several months ago to discuss the idea of incorporating energy into our scope and possibly renaming our journal. We investigated this issue extensively during the AIChE Salt Lake City national meeting. All constituencies with whom I spoke, including the publications committee, the environmental division leadership, and members of the editorial board, strongly supported the idea. The concept of explicitly listing energy (or sustainable energy) in our mission was widely believed to be appropriate, largely because April 2008 1
of the close tie-ins with the environmental issues (presumably, one of the reasons we already publish significant content in that area). With the breadth of support from all constituencies for expanding our coverage of sustainable issues of energy technologies, I am pleased to announce that Environmental Progress has modified our statement of scope and our publication structure. Our new scope statement describes three primary areas of interest: Issues of the environment, including air, water, and waste treatment and remediation, abatement and control, and environmental regulation and compliance; Sustainability, including life cycle analysis, materials from biomass, biorefineries, and green engineering; and Sustainable energy, including CO2 capture and sequestration, biofuels, chemical issues of alternative energy technologies, and energy efficiency. These subtopics are by no means complete, but merely list examples of the types of submissions we will be seeking. In all cases, we still expect a discussion of the environmental issues, and we will still seek an applied focus. In light of the revised scope, you will also see a streamlined listing of sections within the journal. We now will list only three sections: remediation/treatment, sustainability, and sustainable energy. Our ‘‘Environmental Updates’’ is being renamed to high-
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light the greater emphasis on sustainability and energy, and will also be organized into this revised structure, to further highlight our expanded interest on issues of sustainability and sustainable energy. As we move forward, we are considering further changes to increase the emphasis of sustainability and sustainable energy within Environmental Progress, in an effort to keep up with the increased emphasis within our chemical engineering community. You can look forward to increased coverage in these areas, and special issues that focus on sustainable energy in the forthcoming issues. We will reorganize our editorial board to take advantage of their greater expertise in these areas to keep up with the growing interest and contributions and so that I can call on these individuals to assist in the reviewing process. I would welcome your suggestions of possible new board members in these areas. We are very excited about the expansion of our journal’s scope to more completely describe the current interests of chemical engineers working on environmental issues. Our growth and interest into sustainable energy is truly representative of our environmental progress and reflective of the greater concerns of today’s society. I look forward to our moving together in this new direction, and thank you for your continued support and readership.
Environmental Progress (Vol.27, No.1) DOI 10.1002/ep
