As a nation, Americans officially generate more waste than any other nation in the world, with more than 12 billion T of industrial waste are generated annually in the United States. And the United States’s “waste stream” comes from manufacturing, retailing, and commercial trade in the US economy. This is equivalent to more than 40 T of waste for every man, woman, and child in the country. The sheer magnitude of these numbers is cause for concern and drives us to identify the characteristics of the wastes, the industrial operations that are generating the waste, and the manner in which the waste are being managed.
Waste may be defined differently in legislation and regulations of the federal government or individual states. Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations dealing with protection of the environment contains at least four different definitions of waste at sections 60.111b, 61.341, 191.12 and 704.83. Definitions may apply broadly to solid, liquid, and gaseous forms or may be specific to one or a subset identified by a threshold characteristic such as toxicity or radioactivity. Discarding, discharge, or disposal (as opposed to sales) is often a requirement for identification as waste, although stored or recycled material may be included within some definitions, and those definitions may reduce recycling options (King 1995).
Industrial Wastes Management Approach
In this section, we will focus on the best available industrial processes, techniques, and technologies that treat wastestreams, including sold and hazardous wastes, as well as innovative and emerging processes that have better potential for achieving the highest standards in pollution prevention at the plant level, leading to zero effect and zero defect (ZED). To move toward ZED via “process pollution prevention” (P3), industries must use processes that deploy materials and energy efficiently enough to neutralize contaminants in the waste stream. The ultimate goal is to remove pollutants from the waste streams and convert them into products or feeds for other processes. Logically then, P3 refers to industrial processes by which materials and energy are efficiently utilized to achieve the end product(s) while reducing or eliminating the creation of pollutants or waste at the source.
Industrial waste is the waste produced by industrial activity which includes any material that is rendered useless during a manufacturing process such as that of factories, industries, mills, mining operations, and thermal and nuclear power plant. Some examples of industrial wastes are chemical solvents, pigments, sludge, metals, ash, paints, sandpaper, paper products, industrial by‐products, metals, and radioactive wastes.
Toxic waste, chemical waste, industrial solid waste, and municipal solid waste (i.e. primary and secondary sludge from POTWs) are designations of industrial wastes. Wastewater treatment plants can treat some industrial wastes, i.e. those consisting of conventional pollutants such as BOD, COD, and TSS). Industrial wastes containing toxic pollutants require specialized treatment systems.
Waste as Pollution
A waste is defined as an unwanted by‐product or damaged, defective, or superfluous material of a manufacturing process. Most often, in its current state, it has or is perceived to have no value. It may or may not be harmful or toxic if released to the environment. Pollution is any release of waste to environment (i.e. any routine or accidental emission, effluent, spill, discharge or disposal to the air, land, or water) that contaminates or degrades the environment.
In 2010, Americans generated about 270 million T of municipal solid waste (MSW), an increase of 16% over 2000 and 53% over 1980 (USEPA 2012). Thus, management of MSW continues to be an important challenge facing the United States and other highly industrialized nations in the twenty‐first century. Solid waste management is critical in the developed world, and developing world as well, where age‐old traditions of wasting nothing (recycle and reuse) are often followed without regard to the significance and implications of the ZED concept.
Why Recycle?
Each ton of solid waste diverted from disposal, whether reused, recycled, converted in a waste‐to‐energy (WtE) program or composted is one less ton of solid waste requiring disposal. To see the value of reusing, recycling, and composting solid waste, one need to simply consider the amount of disposal space required to accept that material. By implementing environmentally benign waste management strategies (as well as resource‐management strategies), a population can reduce its dependence on incinerators and landfills. And when recycled materials are substituted for virgin plastics, metal ores, minerals, glass, paper and trees, there is less pressure to expand the chemical, mining, and forestry industries. Supplying industry with recycled materials is preferable to extracting virgin resources from mines and forests not only because it conserves scarce natural resources but because it reduces dangerous air and water pollutants, such as greenhouse‐gas emissions and saves energy.
Saving energy is an important environmental benefit of recycling because generating energy usually requires fossil‐fuel consumption and results in emissions that pollute the air and water. The energy required to manufacture paper, plastics, glass, and metal from recycled materials is generally less than the energy required to produce them from virgin materials. Additionally, the collection, processing, and transportation of recycled materials typically uses less energy than the extraction, refinement, transportation, and processing steps to which virgin materials must be subjected before industry can use them.
As is well known, a great amount of energy used in industrial processes and in transportation comes from the burning of fossil fuels. Recycling helps stem the dangers of global climate change by reducing the amount of energy used by industry, thus reducing greenhouse‐gas emissions as well.
Chemical Waste
Chemical waste is a waste that is made from harmful chemicals (mostly produced by large factories). Chemical waste may fall under regulations such as COSHH in the United Kingdom, or the CWA and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) in the United States. In the United States, the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), as well as state and local regulations also regulate chemical use and disposal (Hallam 2010). Chemical waste may or may not be classed as hazardous waste. A chemical hazardous waste is a solid, liquid, or gaseous material that displays either a “hazardous characteristic” or is specifically “listed” by name as a hazardous waste (for HAPs, see Appendix C.1). There are four characteristics chemical wastes may have to be considered as hazardous. These are ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity, and toxicity. This type of hazardous waste must be categorized as to its identity, constituents, and hazards so that it may be safely handled and managed (University of Pennsylvania 2016). Chemical waste is a broad term and encompasses many types of materials. Consult the Material Safety Data Sheet, Product Data Sheet, or Label for a list of constituents. These sources should state whether this chemical waste is a waste that needs special disposal (University of Pennsylvania 2016).
Electronic Waste
Electronic waste in the United States have become an ever‐growing problem in the United States. Each year, over 3.2 million T of electronic waste is put in US landfills. A large portion of this electronic waste is computers, monitors, and televisions. Over 100 million computers, monitors, and televisions are disposed of yearly in the United States (Weidenhamer and Clement 2007). Although there is an enormous amount of electronic waste in the United States, the EPA found that in 2009 approximately only about 25% of all electronic waste is recycled in the United States. About 70% of metals that are found in the United States landfills come from electronic devices. The disposal of all this electronic waste has a detrimental effect on the environment, as well as the global economy.
Electronic waste has become serious issue for the environmental stability in the United States. Over the years, the government has become increasingly more involved in this issue. As described in the USEPA office of RCRA report of 2009, after the electronic products are purchased and used, they are separated into two groups. One group of electronics is collected for recycling, while the other is disposal. After this, the products that are at disposal mainly are put into landfills, and the rest of the electronics that were collected for recycling are either refurbished, reused, or used for material (Stephenson 2008). Hans Tammemagi, the author of The Waste Crisis, talks about the detrimental effect the waste has on the environment. Nearly 20% of all waste in the United States is being incinerated, while the rest of it is being put into landfills (Tammemagi 1999). That leaves almost 80% of the waste consumed in the United States being placed into landfills. Out of this 80% of the waste, the majority of this waste is primarily electronic.
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