Unit 8 Project

MEE 5801, Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit VIII Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

7. Solve hazardous waste related problems through collaborative methods of problem solving. 7.1 Discuss the waste profiling process, using the laboratory report as a metric of the industrial and

hazardous waste treatment system’s effectiveness. 7.2 Discuss the landfill coordination and acceptance of solid waste generated from the

industrial and hazardous waste treatment process.

Reading Assignment This unit contains no textbook reading assignment.

Unit Lesson In our last unit, we studied the process of properly characterizing waste as being either related to Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous or non-hazardous. This involved contracting with a commercial testing laboratory and evaluating the solid waste for toxicity, reactivity, corrosivity, and ignitability. In order to help us tie together the entire solid waste characterization and disposal process, it may benefit us to walk through a specific example together during this lesson. This will consequently incorporate your knowledge built from Unit VII as well as expand your understanding of the entire industrial and solid waste management process. For our scenario together, let’s consider that your developed transfer storage disposal facility (TSDF) pretreatment process that you have designed since Unit I has now generated a filter cake solid and you are ready to dispose of the filter cake. Your client has informed you that they want to landfill any solid wastes generated from the facility as they have no current markets for land farming or recycling. Sampling and Testing Understanding the principles that you learned in Unit VII, including the Toxicity Characteristics Leaching Procedure (TCLP) and the reactivity, corrosivity, and ignitability (RCI) testing, the first thing that you do is pick up the phone and call the environmental testing laboratory technical-sales person that made a visit to your office a few weeks ago. She left you her card and asked you to contact her if you ever had a need for testing. When she answers the phone, the two of you discuss your interest in sending the filter cake to a landfill. She asks you to please send her an email with the request, asking specifically for the tests for which you need your filter cake analyzed. You send her requests for the following tests: (a) complete TCLP (including pesticides and herbicides), and (b) RCI. She comes by the next day, samples the filter cake solids, and transports the samples back to the laboratory for login and analysis. About ten days later, you receive the lab report. These are your results: (a) all metals are “nd” (non-detect) for everything except chromium at 4.9 mg/L (ppm), (b) non-reactive, (c) non-corrosive with a pH of 8.4, (d) not ignitable with a flashpoint of > 160ºF, (e) benzene at 1.5 mg/L, (f) chlordane at 0.024 mg/L, and (g) toxaphene at 0.6 mg/L. Waste Profiling You find a copy of a chart from a vendor that you picked up from a trade show last spring and begin tabulating the 40CFR 261.24. You compare your lab report against the RCRA limits and find that you actually do have two parameters that demonstrate RCRA hazardous with the reported TCLP values: (a) benzene (RCRA limit

UNIT VIII STUDY GUIDE

Designing Integrated Industrial & Waste Management Systems

MEE 5801, Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management 2

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

of 0.5 ppm), and (b) toxaphene (RCRA limit of 0.5 ppm). You take a sticky note and write the following information (Blackman, 2001):

 benzene (D018), and

 toxaphene (D015). You now realize that the filter cake is considered to be an RCRA Hazardous Waste (Blackman, 2001). This was not what you had hoped, but you know what to do. Waste Hauling and Landfilling You dig back into the top drawer of your desk and pull out another business card. This one is for a technical sales professional that works for a hazardous landfill. You call and discuss your waste profile with the landfill specialist, informing him of your two RCRA listed waste characteristics. He tells you that he has a landfill cell dedicated to just these characteristics and sends out a 25 yd3 roll-off box in which to collect the filter cake from your filter press. The operations crew finishes filling and covering the roll-off box, and the landfill specialist arrives with the truck to haul the filter cake to the landfill. He informs you that the filter cake will be tested for free liquids (describing a “paint filter test”) at the scale house prior to entering the landfill. He then has you fill out the waste manifest for the load, indicating the volume of the roll-off box, the D-listed waste profile, and a copy of the laboratory report. The landfill specialist informs you that once the filter cake has been disposed of into the landfill, a copy of the fully-signed waste manifest will be returned to you in the mail. The truck takes the filter cake away, and you are finished with the project. The last thing that you need to do is scan a copy of the manifest for the accounting department (as back-up for the forthcoming invoice from the landfill) and put the hard copy of the waste manifest into your well-labeled filing cabinet in your office. The above scenario should really help you for the final section (Unit VIII) of your proposed industrial and hazardous waste treatment facility proposal. Let’s see how well all of this comes together with this collaborative approach to solving the difficult problem of industrial and hazardous waste treatment from the three identified sources described in Unit I. You can now be confident in your ability to understand how to effectively separate, treat, and dispose of a wide range of industrial liquid and solid wastes generated from a wide cross-section of industry!

Reference Blackman, W. (2001). Basic hazardous waste management (3rd ed.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Suggested Reading The suggested reading will give you additional resources related to the content for this unit. The article can be found using the Academic Search Complete database in the CSU library. Caccavale, S. (1999). The safety professional's guide to understanding the solid and hazardous waste

regulations. Professional Safety, 44(9), 18-22.