Sorting companies

The textile recycling industry has a myriad of players that includes consumers, policy makers, solid-waste managers, not-for-profit agencies, and for-profit retail businesses (Hawley, 2000). Textile sorting companies, known as rag graders , acquire, sort, process, export, and market pre- and post-consumer textile products for various markets. The primary focus in this chapter is on post-consumer apparel... 

Depending on the current economic climate (primarily associated with materials availability, current value-added markets, and the current commodity price for used textiles), for-profit rag-sorting companies realize both success and hardship. Although the primary goal for these small businesses is to earn profits, the business owners also are very committed to environmental philosophies and take piide in their contribution to waste reduction. As one informant offered ... 

The Research-Production Company (RPC) Zond (city of Ivano-Frankivsk) now is a well-known centre for development, fabrication and introduction of the technologies and methods of NOT of oil and gas equipment and tools Its experts developed and introduced the technologies and equipment which enables control of the drill pipes, especially their threaded joints, oil and gas equipment, sort out the pipes into groups by the strength and yield point of the pipes material, etc. 

BENZALDEHYDE The precursor for speed. It makes up nearly 100% of bitter almond oil. Not a very popular oil with the DEA. Some hints Benzaldehyde is indispensable for the flavoring industry. It is the flavor in almond extract and synthetic benzaldehyde is used in all cherry flavorings. Also, there is currently a little loophole in the system when it comes to a product called Roasted Cassia Oil . Apparently, some manufacturers take cassia oil and run it through some sort of industrial process to change it into benzaldehyde. No one wanted to tell Strike the particulars of how this was done. But one company chemist gave me some hints (You can get really chatty with some of these guys). 

The third reason is economic. Many companies spend more on safety measures than some of their competitors and thus pay a sort of self-imposed tax. If we tell our competitors about the action we took after an accident, they may spend as much as we have done on preventing that accident from happening again. 

The ultimate goal of process development is to achieve feasibility where it is possible to produce amino adds on a large scale at a production cost per kg of amino add comparable to, or cheaper than, the processes currently used by other companies. If we presume that the technical performance (fermentation and recovery) are sorted out on a laboratory scale and scaling up looks promising, then it is time to find out whether it is possible to operate economically on a large scale. 

When using the defect-detection approach to quality control certain problems develop. Inspection does nothing to improve the process and is not very good at sorting good-from-bad. Also, sampling plans developed to support an acceptable quality level (AQL) of 5%, for example, say that a company is content to deliver or reject 5% defects. 

If it is assumed that precursors can be identified in a scientific way, the next research question can be formulated. By using only precursors the elimination of all possible accidents is extremely unlikely. Retrieving precursors and acting upon them can be seen as a sort of fire fighting approach. It is more important to devise pro-active measures to discover the underlying factors, causing the possible accidents. Subsequently companies can direct resources at these identified causal factors and possible accidents can actually be prevented. The next research question is therefore formulated as ... 

The identified precursors will be sorted according their perceived risk , which means their likelihood and consequences. The likelihood can often be established from the data sources, although the possible consequences for safety are estimated and are therefore always subjective. The likelihood of the precursors is identified by establishing the aggregation level and relative frequency of the identified precursors, as discussed in Chapter 5. Table 17 shows an example of the retrieved likelihood from precursors identified in company A during a specified time period of a year. 

---