Last month, Royal Dutch Shell (The Hague, the Netherlands; www.shell.com) released a report1 that assesses the company’s alignment with 19 industry associations on climate-related policy. In the report, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden states “The need for urgent action in…
To determine the impact of the chemical industry’s contributions to the global economy, the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA; www.icca-chem.org) commissioned Oxford Economics to provide a detailed assessment. Last month, the results were released in the report: The Global…
The technologies associated with the Industrial Internet of Things, and the benefits that can be attained from them, are topics that are frequently described in the pages of Chemical Engineering. Finding and implementing the best new technologies for an application…
Last month, almost 30 global companies announced the formation of an alliance to address the impact that plastic waste is having on our environment, with particular focus on our oceans. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW; www.endplasticwaste.org) has committed…
As chemical engineers, many of us work on developing new processes or improving current ones, often with goals of better efficiency, new or improved products and more sustainability. Taking concepts and laboratory work to a commercial scale requires significant effort,…
Last month, news broadcasts announced that an artificial intelligence (AI) news anchor, said to be the world’s first ever, had gone live in China. 1 The AI anchor was modeled after a real-life news presenter, and is said to be…
While it may not be obvious to the average driver, the number of electric vehicles (EVs) on the roads is increasing rapidly, and correspondingly, the number of available charging stations is also growing. Worldwide, about two million electric cars were…
This year, hurricane season in the U.S. has been active again, with Hurricane Florence battering North Carolina and its surroundings last month. While wind speeds labeled it as a Category 1 hurricane at landfall, the enormous, slow-moving storm caused great…
The results of a recent survey (2018 Pulse of Engineering Survey*) give a snapshot of how over 2,200 survey respondents view their current work environments. The respondents were predominantly design engineers (37%), followed by those in research and development, consulting,…
I first visited Achema some years ago, while I was working in Europe as an R&D project leader for a large, international chemical company. It was my first year living in the Netherlands on an expatriate assignment from the U.S.,…