Pollution Prevention: Mass-Balance Simulator

Pollution prevention is a systems problem: what you keep out of the waste stream in the first place matters more than what you clean up afterward. This simulator models a real industrial process as a live mass balance — raw material flows in, a process node splits it into product and waste according to an intrinsic yield, and a recycling loop can route waste back into the input stream instead of releasing it. Three real prevention levers — source reduction, material substitution and recycling — each act on a different term of the mass-balance equations, and a 3D particle stream shows the material physically moving through the system: green particles are raw or recycled feedstock, grey particles are finished product, and red particles are the pollutant that actually escapes, drifting up into a haze layer whose depth tracks the cumulative kilograms released. Live readouts track virgin material draw, output, waste released, recycled mass, process efficiency (output/input) and cumulative pollutant mass, so you can see directly how the pollution-prevention hierarchy — reduce, substitute, reuse — outperforms end-of-pipe cleanup.