Waste situation

This chapter presents a characterization of the e-waste situation, particularly in terms of intervention attempts made in order to manage it safely. The more prominent agreements, policies, systems, and laws at the national and international level are surveyed. Samples are provided of the environmental and human consequences of large-scale movements of toxic e-waste to the developing world. Trends for the next several years are noted, too. 

On 29 September 1957, eleven days before the Windscale accident, there was a chemical explosion in a Soviet plant treating active wastes, situated in the Urals. No mention of the accident was made in Soviet media at the time, but an exiled scientist, Z. A. Medvedev collected information and published it in the west (Medvedev, 1976, 1979). A further study, using Medvedev s data and oblique references to the effects of the disaster in Soviet ecological literature, was made by scientists at Oak Ridge (Trabalka et al., 1980). After the elapse of 32 a,... 

Because of the extremely diverse situations in which hazardous materials are involved, each study presents unique problems. Table I illustrates the diversity, both in waste materials and exposure settings, of eight recent toxic waste situations. Differences, in fact, can be quite large, ranging from the common drum-filled dump site to the widespread dispersal of waste material. Some generalizations, however, can be made about these kinds of studies. 

The first step in any toxic waste study is to determine what toxic materials are present and in what amounts. Since most toxic waste situations involve the dumping of diverse materials, problems of expensive technical methodology can be formidable. However, without an adequate inventory of the... 

To explore the possible cause of reported cancer excesses, and particularly to examine the possible relationship between the town s toxic waste situation and the childhood leukemia case concentration, MDPH and CDC, in 1980, conducted a joint study. Incidence patterns for selected types of cancer were studied by using data collected from local and regional hospital sources. Increased frequencies for childhood leukemia and for kidney cancer were confirmed, with the childhood leukemia excess being located in one particular census tract. 

Obtain an overall picture of the toxic waste situation... 

DONATH, F., The low-level radioactive waste situation Storage or disposal , GSA Today, 5(5), (1995) 98-99. 

This stability is important to plastics long-term performance. However, for some applications only short-term performance is desired before the product is discarded, as in the fast-food and packaging markets. In such cases it is considered advantageous for discarded plastic to degrade when exposed to microbes. There thus exists a requirement to develop or modify plastics possessing the properties required for their service life, but with the capability of degrading in a timely and safe manner, particularly to handle the worldwide waste situation. 

To characterise waste streams by material balance can require considerable effort. However, by doing so, a more complete picture of the waste situation can be established. This helps to establish the focus of the waste minimisation activities and provides a baseline for measuring performance. 

Additional separation and recycling. Once the possibilities for recycling streams directly, feed purification, and eliminating the use of extraneous materials for separation that cannot be recycled efiiciently have been exhausted, attention is turned to the fourth option, the degree of material recovery from the waste streams that are left. One very important point which should not be forgotten is that once the waste stream is rejected, any valuable material turns into a liability as an effluent material. The level of recovery in such situations needs careful consideration. It may be economical to carry out additional separation of the valuable material with a view to recycling that additional recovered material, particularly when the cost of downstream effluent treatment is taken into consideration. 

The examples in the preceding section, of the flotation of lead and copper ores by xanthates, was one in which chemical forces predominated in the adsorption of the collector. Flotation processes have been applied to a number of other minerals that are either ionic in type, such as potassium chloride, or are insoluble oxides such as quartz and iron oxide, or ink pigments [needed to be removed in waste paper processing [92]]. In the case of quartz, surfactants such as alkyl amines are used, and the situation is complicated by micelle formation (see next section), which can also occur in the adsorbed layer [93, 94]. 

Electric power generation using biomass as a fuel is economic in situations where the cost of the fuel is competitive with that of fossil fuels. The cost of a commercially available biomass steam—electric power plant is about 1500/kW for a wood-fired facility. If wood can be obtained at a cost of 2.00/GJ ( 2.10 X 10 /Btu), the total cost of power for base-load operation would be about 0.05/kWh. If wood or agricultural wastes are available at... 

There are situations where thermal oxidation may be preferred over catalytic oxidation for exhaust streams that contain significant amounts of catalyst poisons and/or fouling agents, thermal oxidation may be the only technically feasible control where extremely high VOC destmction efficiencies of difficult to control VOC species are required, thermal oxidation may attain higher performance and for relatively rich VOC waste gas streams, ie, having >20 25% lower explosive limit (LEL), the gas stream s explosive properties and the potential for catalyst overheating may require the addition of dilution air to the waste gas stream (12). 

Develop procedures for deahug with with emergency situations involving the storage, collection, treatment, and disposal of hazardous wastes. 

Due to both carbonization and penetration of chloride ions, steel will pass from a passive to an active condition and (consequently) may corrode. If the mortar is completely surrounded by water, oxygen diffusion in wet mortar is extremely low so that the situation is corrosion resistant because the cathodic partial reaction according to Eq. (2-17) scarcely occurs. For this reason the mortar lining of waste pipes remains protective against corrosion even if it is completely carbonated or if it is penetrated by chloride ions. 

---