Sustainability Challenge:
Manufacturing processes within the health care and agricultural chemical industries generate by-products that can be difficult to recover and consequently added to the waste stream.
Chemistry Solution:
Through its Recover and Return Program, Nova Molecular Technologies employs multiple technologies to generate a purified solvent that could be returned back to the customer or sold on the commercial market, removing this volume from the waste stream.
Sustainability Benefit:
Since the inception of its Recover and Return Program in 2016, Nova has successfully diverted more than 125 million pounds of high-value material from the waste stream through sustainable purification processes.
Increasingly, manufacturers in the healthcare and agricultural chemical industries are facing raw materials shortages that can hinder their ability to bring medical therapies and food products to market. At the same time, these industries have had limited access to comprehensive solutions that enable recovery and reuse of their raw materials that also meet stringent U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements.
To address this, in 2016 Nova Molecular Technologies, a producer of high-purity solvents, launched its Recover and Return Initiative. Nova partners with manufacturers in the AgroChem and healthcare sectors to develop customized processes to recover solvents that would otherwise enter the waste stream.
Nova’s Recover and Return process uses multiple novel, high-performance purification technologies to isolate and recover key chemical materials from waste or by-product streams and generate a purified solvent that can be returned back to the customer or sold to the commercial market.
By recovering chemicals that would traditionally be sent to waste disposal, the Recover and Return initiative helps companies reduce their environmental impact while also enabling increased raw material supply certainty. Since 2016, Nova has successfully diverted over 125 million pounds of material from the waste stream and continues to grow the Recover and Return to positively impact the environment, their customers, and the communities in which they operate.
Nova has successfully implemented multiple projects within the healthcare manufacturing sector and is delving in to new areas to Recover and Return waste material. At the same time, Nova is providing much needed stability in the raw material supply for these manufacturers to ensure patients receive life-saving therapies.
Diagram of the Nova Recover and Return process:
![Nova recovery and return graphic](https://www.americanchemistry.com/var/site/storage/images/_aliases/image_full/0/4/5/4/94540-1-eng-US/nova-recovery-and-return-graphic.png?format=avif)