Application of analytical methods for characterization of waste and recovered solvents

This project is focalised on defining an analytical method for the determination of several types of volatile organic compounds and it is applied to control the processes of solvent recovery. “Solvent Recovery” consists in the distillation and purification of organic solvents, with the objective to produce pure solvent or mix of solvents that are then re-used in the manufacturing industrial processes. It is a strategy of pharmaceutical industry for a sustainable environment and the solvent recovery represents a growing business in waste management. In fact, environmental protection is often an important prerogative of any new process and new industrial technologies. Official analytical methods for analysis of solvents, in environmental matrix, specified the compounds and conditions to carry out an analysis. In this work, the method EPA 8015D is evaluated as preferential method for the analysis. This method is enhanced for a great number of solvents. Purpose of this work has been the definition of rapid and reliable analytical method for the determination of solvents in the recovered solvents. This work shows the presentation and the statistical elaboration of results obtained following the iter of validation of the analytical method. The interest was focused on recovery data to evaluate the precision, accuracy and reproducibility of the analytical method. The evaluation of z-score, recovery and the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) played a pivotal role to demonstrate the validity of the purpose of this work.