1. 1 Solid, Toxic and Hazardous Waste

2. 2 Outline Solid Waste Waste Disposal Methods Shrinking the Waste Stream  Recycling Hazardous and Toxic Wastes  Federal Legislation - RCRA - CERCLA  Management Options

3. 3 SOLID WASTE According to EPA, U.S. produces 11 billion tons of solid waste annually.  About half is agricultural waste.  More than one-third is mining related.  Industrial Waste - 400 million metric tons. - Hazardous/Toxic - 60 million metric tons.  Municipal Waste - 200 million metric tons. - Two-thirds of a ton per person.  Waste Stream

4. 4 What Does One Ton of Trash Look Like? Trash-o-saurus at Hartford, CT, Garbage Museum is made from one ton of trash, which is about the amount each of us throws away every year!

5. 5 U.S. Domestic Waste

6. 6 WASTE DISPOSAL METHODS Open Dumps  Open, unregulated dumps are still the predominant method of waste disposal in developing countries. - Most developed countries forbid open dumping.  Estimated 200 million liters of motor oil are poured into the sewers or soak into the ground each year in the U.S..  Five times volume of Exxon Valdez.

7. 7 Examples of Open Dumps

8. 8 Waste Disposal Methods Landfills  Sanitary Landfills - Refuse compacted and covered everyday with a layer of dirt.  Dirt takes up as much as 20% of landfill space.  Since 1994, all operating landfills in the U.S. have been required to control hazardous substances.

9. 9 Examples of Sanitary Landfills Sanitary landfill with leachate treatment and gas recovery. Bioreactor landfill with leachate recirculation or irrigation

10. 10 Sanitary Landfill

11. 11 Landfills Historically, landfills have been a convenient, inexpensive waste-disposal option.  Increasing land and shipping fees, and demanding construction and maintenance requirements are increasing costs. - Suitable landfill sites are become scarce.  Increasingly, communities are rejecting new landfills.  Old landfills are quickly reaching capacity and closing.

12. 12 Waste Disposal Methods Exporting Waste  Although most industrialized nations have agreed to stop shipping hazardous and toxic waste to less-developed countries, the practice still continues. - Garbage imperialism also operates in wealthier countries. - Indian reservations increasingly being approached to store wastes on reservations.

13. 13 Waste Disposal Methods Incineration and Resource Recovery  Energy Recovery - Heat derived from incinerated refuse is a useful resource. - Steam used for heating buildings or generating electricity.

14. 14 Incinerator Types Refuse-Derived Fuel - Refuse is sorted to remove recyclable and unburnable materials. - Higher energy content than raw trash. Mass Burn - Everything smaller than major furniture and appliances loaded into furnace. - Creates air pollution problems. Reduces disposal volume by 80-90%.  Residual ash usually contains toxic material.

15. 15

16. 16 Incinerator Cost and Safety Initial construction costs are usually between $100 and $300 million for a typical municipal facility.  Tipping fess are often much higher than tipping fees at landfills. EPA has found alarmingly high toxin levels in incinerator ash.  Concentrated in fly ash. - Pollution control methods are not guaranteed to be 100% effective.

17. 17 Fly Ash 0.5 µm to 100 µm Can be contaminated with Pb, Ag, Cr, Cd, As and other chemicals from paper, metal, plastics, etc. Gets into air, can be breathed into lungs

18. 18 New Problem e-Waste! Used computers, monitors, printers eliminated as technology changes Toxic metals (Pb, Hg) found in components, can leach into soil and aquifers More e-Waste in developing countries soon! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/0 4/100428121451.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/0 4/100428121451.htm

19. 19 What’s the Problem? Electronics waste -- or e-waste -- is often exported from the United States and other developed nations to regions in China, India, Thailand and less developed countries where recycling is done in a crude fashion. To recover copper from e-waste, for instance, wires are pulled out, piled up and burned to remove insulation covering the copper. This emits dioxins and other pollutants. Toxic cyanide and acids used to remove gold from circuit boards of junked computers also are released into the environment.

20. 20 Environmental Justice with a touch of NIMBY Recycling methods used in family-run workshops in developing countries could pose a serious health risk to residents of the area through ingestion and inhalation of contaminated dust, the researchers say. China is now the destination for 70 percent of the computers, TVs, cell phones, and other e-waste recycled globally each year.

21. 21 U.S. stance Congress is debating House Resolution 2595, which would ban the export of e-waste from the United States (as of March 22. 2010) "The underlying assumption of this bill and other trade bans is that most e-waste comes from outside developing nations, and that stopping trade with developed countries would cut off the supply of e-waste and stop backyard recycling," Williams says.

22. 22

23. 23 REDUCE Don’t use plastic or paper plates/ cups – take washable items! Pack a no waste lunch with reusable containers to hold lunch items Buy in bulk and bring your own container if possible (most scales have a ‘tare’ button) Stop junk mail www.dmachoice.org (generates 4.33 million tons of waste/year)www.dmachoice.org Kick the paper towel habit! Reusable, washable towels can help clean and reduce waste. Toxins in your home. Use water and vinegar in a spray bottle to clean windows. Use rubbing alcohol to disinfect and shine up chrome and nickel faucets. Baking soda cleans drains and sinks

24. 24 REUSE Tired of your furniture? Paint or repaint it. Add a faux finish. Take old T-shirts and use to clean the house or your car (very soft and can be washed) Have favorite T-shirts (like concert T’s) sewn together to make a quilt or blanket Have a clothing swap with friends! Gently used clothing might be old to you but new to them! Sell or give away on Craig’s List or other online vendors Clean baby wipe containers and use to store things No really! Flatten, wash and reuse aluminum foil. Use PET water bottles to freeze water in and put in your lunch bag – keeps food cold! Purchase milk from a creamery that uses glass bottles. They pick up the old bottles when you get new milk.

25. 25

26. 26 SHRINKING THE WASTE STREAM Recycling  Recycling is the reprocessing of discarded materials into new, useful products. - Currently, about two-thirds of all aluminum cans are recycled.  Half of all aluminum cans on grocery shelves will be made into another can within two months.

27. 27 Recycling Potential Problems  Market prices fluctuate wildly.  Contamination - Most of 24 billion plastic soft drink bottles sold annually in the U.S. are PET, which can be melted and remanufactured into many items.  But a single PVC bottle cap can ruin an entire truckload of PET if melted together.

28. 28 Mechanical/Human Separation Bottle caps are No. 5 plastic and water/soda bottles are No. 1 plastic Can’t be melted together as it ruins the melt! Caps also jam separation machines at landfill! Remove caps and put in a separate bag!

29. 29 U.S. Recycling Rates

30. 30 Recycling Benefits  Saves money, raw materials, and land.  Encourages individual responsibility.  Reduces pressure on disposal systems. - Japan recycles about half of all household and commercial wastes.  Lowers demand for raw resources.  Reduces energy consumption and air pollution.  Decreases landfill load

31. 31 Recycling Benefits Example  Recycling 1 ton of aluminum saves 4 tons of bauxite, 700 kg of coke and pitch, and keeps 35 kg of aluminum fluoride out of the air. - Producing aluminum from scrap instead of bauxite ore cuts energy use by 95%.  Yet still throw away more than a million tons of aluminum annually.

32. 32 Shrinking the Waste Stream Composting  Biological degradation of organic material under aerobic conditions. Demanufacturing  Disassembly and recycling of obsolete consumer products, such as appliances and computers Reuse  Reusable glass container makes an average of 15 round-trips between factory and customer before it has to be recycled.

33. 33 Anatomy of a Compost Heap Brown leaves, small twigs Fresh grass, leaf clippings, Kitchen veggie/fruit scraps

34. 34 Shrinking the Waste Stream Producing Less Waste  Excess packaging of food and consumer products is one of our greatest sources of unnecessary waste. - Paper, plastic, glass, and metal packaging material make up 50% of domestic trash by volume.  Increase use of photodegradable and biodegradable plastics.  Too much emphasis on recycling ? YES

35. 35 IF it’s not in a landfil, it then it might be in http://planetgreen.discovery.com/videos/focus-earth-2-pacific-plastic-the-garbage-patch.html

36. 36 There’s five trash gyres out there!

37. 37 Ocean of Plastic Discarded plastics and other trash caught in circular current or “gyre” Eaten by birds, turtles, fish, porpoises and pretty much any other animal Plastic “break down” into smaller pieces Plastic takes hundreds of years to degrade permanently

38. 38 HAZARDOUS AND TOXIC WASTES EPA estimates U.S. industries generate 265 million metric tons of officially classified hazardous wastes annually.  At least 40 million metric tons of toxic and hazardous wastes are released into the environment each year.

39. 39 Hazardous Waste Legally, hazardous waste is any discarded liquid or solid that contains substances known to be:  Fatal to humans or laboratory animals in low doses.  Toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to humans or other life-forms.  Ignitable with a flash point less than 60 o C.  Explosive or highly reactive.

40. 40 Hazardous Waste History Love Canal Woburn, Massachusetts

41. 41 Hazardous Waste Disposal Federal Legislation  Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) - 1976. - Comprehensive program requiring rigorous testing and management of toxic and hazardous substances.  Cradle to grave accounting.

42. 42 Federal Legislation Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA).  Modified in 1984 by Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act. - Aimed at rapid containment, cleanup, or remediation of abandoned toxic waste sites.  Toxic Release Inventory - Requires 20,000 manufacturing facilities to report annually on releases of more than 300 toxic materials.

43. 43 Cradle to Grave

44. 44 CERCLA Government does not have to prove anyone violated a law, or what role they played in a superfund site.  Liability under CERCLA is “strict, joint, and several”, meaning anyone associated with a site can be held responsible for the entire clean-up cost.

45. 45 Superfund Sites EPA estimates 36,000 seriously contaminated sites in the U.S..  By 1997, 1,400 sites had been placed on the National Priority List for cleanup with with Superfund financing. - Superfund is a revolving pool designed to:  Provide immediate response to emergency situations posing imminent hazards.  Clean-up abandoned or inactive sites.

46. 46 Superfund Sites Total costs for hazardous waste cleanup in the U.S. are estimated between $370 billion and $1.7 trillion.  For years, most of the funding has gone to legal fees, but this situation has improved over past several years. Studies of Superfund sites reveal minorities tend to be over-represented in these neighborhoods.

47. 47

48. 48 How Clean is Clean ? Brownfields - Contaminated properties that have been abandoned or are not being used up to potential because of pollution concerns.  Up to one-third of all commercial industrial sites in urban core of many big cities fall into this category. - In many cases, property owners complain that unreasonably high purity levels are demanded in remediation programs.

49. 49 How Clean is Clean? Clean up levels for hazardous waste http://www.cleanuplevels.com/ http://www.cleanuplevels.com/  Just look to see what is there Our Superfund Region http://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/ http://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/ Click on MD for RCRA and Superfund  Look for sites in Carroll County  Look for W.R. Grace!

50. 50 Let’s Play Monte Carlo! Monte Carlo simulation is a statistical technique by which a quantity is calculated repeatedly, using randomly selected "what-if" scenarios for each calculation. Though the simulation process is internally complex, commercial computer software performs the calculations as a single operation, presenting results in simple graphs and tables. These results approximate the full range of possible outcomes, and the likelihood of each. When Monte Carlo simulation is applied to risk assessment, risk appears as a frequency distribution graph similar to the familiar bell-shaped curve, which non-statisticians can understand intuitively. http://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/risk/human/info/guide1.htm http://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/risk/human/info/guide1.htm

51. 51 Monte Carlo doesn’t always work The EPA does not use the Monte Carlo simulation for Region 3 problems

52. 52 Hazardous Waste Management Options Produce Less Waste  Avoid creating wastes in the first place.  Recycle and Reuse Convert to Less Hazardous Substances  Physical Treatment (Isolation)  Incineration  Chemical Processing (Transformation)  Bioremediation (Microorganisms)

53. 53 Hazardous Waste Management Options Store Permanently  Retrievable Storage - Can be inspected and periodically retrieved.  Secure Landfills - Modern, complex landfills with multiple liners and other impervious layers and monitoring systems.

54. 54 Toxic Waste Secure Landfill

55. 55 Summary Solid Waste Waste Disposal Methods Shrinking the Waste Stream  Recycling Hazardous and Toxic Wastes  Federal Legislation - RCRA - CERCLA  Management Options

56. 56