Sustainable Solutions: Sustainable waste management

 There are different approaches to treating waste, but the following points are common principles followed by many inside and outside the US. Which of the following categories does your organization fall in?
  1. Prevent waste
    • The best thing to do is to not generate waste. If that is not possible, try to substitute non-hazardous or less hazardous chemicals into your processes.
    • Think about only ordering chemicals that you need to use now vs. buying bulk chemicals/larger quantity to receive a discount in cost. In the end, this costs you more because you have to dispose of the excess that you do not end up using. In addition, this is not a sustainable practice.
    • Instead of sending something to the waste pile, find out if others in the organization are able to use it, this prevents waste and cuts disposal costs.
  2. Prepare to re-use
    • You may ask yourself, how am I going to reuse this? Electronic waste can be reused, instead of disposing of the escrap as hazardous waste, it can be taken apart and induvial pieces may be reused or an entire electronic item may be refurbished for reuse. Imagine, about 1/3 of material arriving at recycling centers have significant reuse value.
    • You may recycle solvents at your site by removing water content to reuse the solvent.
    • Fuels blending is a disposal method for solvent waste. The solvent waste is bulked into tankers where the tanker loads go to cement kilns and use the solvent waste to fuel the kilns. This is considered beneficial reuse.
  3. Recycling
    • Universal waste should be recycled: batteries, bulbs, etc.
    • Anytime you can choose recycling as the disposal method, you should do it! Drums can be recycled if they have been purged of all liquids and vapors and meet the requirements for “empty” according to EPA and DOT regulations.
  4. Energy recovery
    • Processes of waste management-when you cannot recycle consider the points below so that the waste materials do not end up in a landfill.
      • Anaerobic digestion
      • Gasification/pyrolysis (produces energy: fuels, heat and power)
      • Incineration with energy recovery
  5. Disposal
    • There is already a cradle to grave requirement for disposal. However, the current state of the US involves deregulation which is not helping the sustainability cause.
    • Disposal is the last resort if all other avenues have been exhausted.

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