INDUSTRIAL AND HAZARDOUS WASTE UNIT 8 PROJECT

STUDY GUIDE
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