Economic Aspects of the Chemical Industry
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Within the formal disciplines of science at traditional universities, through the years, chemistry has grown to have a unique status because of its close correspondence with an industry and with a branch of engineeringthe chemical industry and chemical engineering. There is no biology industry, but aspects of biology have closely related disciplines such as fish raising and other aquaculture, animal cloning and other facets of agriculture, ethical drug of pharmaceutical manufacture, genomics, water quality and conservation, and the like. Although there is no physics industry, there are power generation, electricity, computers, optics, magnetic media, and electronics that exist as industries. However, in the case of chemistry, there is a named industry. This unusual correspondence no doubt came about because in the chemical industry one makes things from raw materials-chemicals-and the science, manufacture, and use of chemicals grew up *Consultant, 1513 Brentwood Rd., Charleston, WV 25314.
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Riegel Handbook of Industrial Chemistry, 1Oth Edition
Edited by Kent. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York 2003
together during the past century or so. In addition, the chemical industry is global in nature. Since there is a chemical industry that serves a major portion of all industrialized economies, providing in the end synthetic drugs, polymers and plastics, fertilizers, textiles, building materials, paints and coatings, colorants and pigments, elastomers, and so on, there is also a subject, "chemical economics," and it is this subject, the economics of the chemical industry that is the concern of this chapter. Of course, the chemical industry does not exist alone, rather it interacts with many aspects of the global economy.
DEFINITION OF THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
Early in the twentieth century, the chemical industry was considered to have two parts: the discovery, synthesis, and manufacture of inorganic and organic chemicals. Later, and until about 1997, the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) of the U.S. Bureau of the 1
2 RIEGEL'S HANDBOOK OF INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY
Census defined "Chemical and Allied Products" as comprising three general classes of products: (1) basic inorganic chemicals such as acids, alkalis, and salts and basic organic chemicals; (2) chemicals to be used in further manufacture such as synthetic fibers, plastic materials, dry colors, pigments; and (3) finished chemical products to be used for ultimate consumer consumption as architectural paints, cosmetics, drugs, and soaps or to be used as materials or supplies in other industries such as industrial paints and coatings, adhesives, fertilizers, and explosives. 1 The SIC system was a series of four-digit number codes that attempted to classify all business by product and service type for the purpose of collection, tabulation, and analyses of data. It used a mixture of market-based and production-based categories. In 1997, the SIC classification was replaced by the "North American Industry Classification System" (NAICS). 2 The system is a ma
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