For years, the chemical industries manufactured products, ship them, store them and dispose of waste essentially unhindered. Environmental awareness, government regulation and economic factors over the last two decades have forced these industries to consider new methods of reducing waste products, ensuring environmental compliance and evaluating processes. Photonics offers several technologies that can help. Chemical manufacturers use infrared and visible imaging to examine storage tanks, spectroscopy to monitor its processes, and machine vision to assess the products that it makes at the end of the manufacturing cycle…