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- Introduction
- When is it essential to do treatment in laboratories?
- Is chemical waste treatment different from other chemistry?
- Do laboratory people need special RCRA training to perform treatment in labs?
- Must treatment reduce hazards?
- How practical is waste treatment in laboratories?
- Should regulators allow treatment in laboratories?
- How can the safety and effectiveness of chemical waste treatment be measured?
- What treatments are prohibited?
- Should EPA regulate the lab safety aspects of waste treatment processes?
Introduction
Chemical waste treatment in laboratories is an essential activity, although it is a minor component of most chemical waste management programs. EPA has affirmed that treatment in labs is permissible [1] although restrictions vary at the state level. This note addresses several issues in a question and answer format to assist university folks who need or want to defend this essential practice.
When is it essential to do treatment in laboratories?
- Treatment is an essential teaching tool. Students need to learn the importance of proper waste management, much of which is accomplished by waste treatment. The best way to teach these responsibilities is to incorporate chemical waste treatment into the laboratory curriculum so that students will learn to fulfill their responsibilities from the start. Indeed, failure to do so may imply to the students that chemical waste management is “someone else’s” concern. (This incorporation has already taken place at many colleges and universities).
- If a chemical waste cannot be transported safely without treatment, it needs to be treated at its present site. If the chemical waste originates in a laboratory, it should be treated there. On-site treatment has, in some cases, been performed under special permits issued by the regulatory agency. Applying for and receiving a special permit requires paperwork and extends the time between identifying and controlling the hazard.
- In many laboratory and building cleanouts, EH&S staff and contractor staff work together. EH&S staff sort and classify chemicals and the contractor prepares labpacks at the site of the cleanout. If some materials require treatment, it is best to perform the treatment at the same time and place where suitable equipment and experts are already present.
- As a general principle, if the best equipment and expertise for treating a particular chemical are in the laboratory, then that is the best place to treat the waste.
Is chemical waste treatment different from other chemistry?
No. Waste treatment is just another chemical process. Processes that EPA considers permissible treatment include neutralization, precipitating heavy metals from solutions, and oxidation/reduction reactions. [2] In fact, if the lab worker lists a treatment or waste reduction step as part of the experimental protocol, it is likely that no-one will be the wiser. See below for prohibited treatments.
Do laboratory people need special RCRA training to perform treatment in labs?
To the laboratory worker, treating a waste is just another chemical process. What people need to know to do treatment in labs is what they need to know to do chemistry in labs. It is all chemistry. The essential message with respect to unwanted chemicals is the same whether doing experimental chemistry or treatment: “Give your unwanted chemicals to EH&S unless EH&S has given you permission to do otherwise.”
The person in the lab may know more about the properties of the chemical or mixture than the EH&S person, especially in smaller institutions that cannot afford the expertise typically found in the EH&S unit of a large research university.
Furthermore, current explicit RCRA training requirements are virtually nil except in permitted facilities. The paper entitled “Chemical waste training” tabulates the limited RCRA training requirements and compares them to OSHA standards. The same paper also proposes a training outline for lab workers that expands on the essential “Give your unwanted outputs to EH&S...” message. The hazardous waste determination need not be performed by the lab worker; the determination may be performed by EH&S staff. [3] Therefore, the training requirements for lab workers are really quite simple.
Nonetheless, regardless of the fuzzy applicability of the rules to laboratories, prudence and good practice dictate that anyone performing a treatment process in a laboratory have documented training in emergency procedures and have proper equipment readily equipment in case of spill or other accident.
Must treatment reduce hazards?
Hazard reduction is probably the most common reason for waste treatment, but it is not the only one. Treatments that reduce volume without affecting hazards, such as evaporation of non-hazardous components, precipitation or phase separation, are important methods for waste reduction as well as cost containment. Because concentrating hazardous components may increase the hazards associated with a mixture, volume reduction may actually increase hazard level. For example, if an inert component such as water is separated from a toxic material, the toxicity of the remaining solution is increased. Nonetheless, volume reduction is an important waste reduction and cost control method that is needed and should be permitted.
How practical is waste treatment in laboratories?
Every institution, large or small, sometimes needs to treat chemical waste in laboratories, as described in the section on essential treatment.
Nonetheless, chemical waste treatment by researchers in their laboratories is generally infrequent at large institutions. Researcher time and laboratory space are scarce. Competition requires researchers to focus on their research and minimize the time and effort devoted to other purposes. Researcher needs and economies of scale allow large institutions to support a strong centralized waste management program with substantial expertise. In addition, the unit cost for waste removal is lower at a large institution because contractor mobilization charges amortize over a larger amount of waste.
Small or predominantly teaching institutions, in contrast, produce smaller amounts and less varied species of chemical waste. These institutions generally cannot support a sophisticated, centralized waste management program. Because the amount of waste is small, the unit cost for removal is high. In fact, the contractor mobilization cost may exceed the waste charges, especially for institutions located away from large cities. The shortage of central services creates a near certainty that the greatest expertise lies in the laboratory that created the waste. All of this gives researchers and teachers in small or predominantly undergraduate institutions a stronger incentive to treat waste in their laboratories.
Should regulators allow treatment in laboratories?
The essential treatment section explains the critical importance of in-lab treatment in certain situations.
The major argument against waste treatment in laboratories appears to be the conviction of some regulators that the original regulatory intent did not include allowing treatment in Satellite Accumulation Areas (SAA). However, other regulators argue that there are eminently sensible reasons to allow treatment in laboratory SAA and the rules leave room for permissive interpretation. As discussed previously, the EPA Office of Solid Waste has affirmed that treatment in laboratories is permissible under present federal regulations.
In addition, as discussed in the previous section, at many institutions, and in some situations at any institution, the workers in the laboratory, i.e. the SAA, have competence to treat their own wastes that is equal to or greater than local EH&S professionals. This is a fundamental difference between academic institutions and typical industrial settings that generate chemical waste.
How can the safety and effectiveness of chemical waste treatment be measured?
Treatment in laboratories needs to meet several requirements to protect the environment and to assure safe and effective waste treatment:
Performance and results
- No significant release of hazardous chemicals or other environmental harm caused by the treatment process
- No harm to people or property caused by the treatment process
- Wastes that are hazardous waste after treatment are identified as regulated material and managed in accordance with RCRA and other regulatory requirements
There is general agreement on these broad objectives. However, the results are difficult to measure retrospectively and some errors could cause serious damage. Therefore, regulators need information about intermediate steps to verify success at meeting the objectives.
Oversight and measurement
Three observable characteristics of treatment procedures are:
- Treatment procedures are safe and effective and observe generally accepted good practices
- Workers are competent to perform the treatment
- Information about procedures used and their results
To assure regulatory compliance, enforcement personnel can more easily measure the oversight requirements. Here are some thoughts about each of the three oversight requirements:
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Treatment procedures are safe and effective and observe generally
accepted good practices.
- Direct testing of each treatment batch is generally the best method to verify effectiveness if adequately sensitive, cost-effective and speedy tests are available.
- The products of some chemical treatments will still be regulated waste but with increased safety, reduced volume and/or reduced cost. If there is doubt about the complete effectiveness of a chemical treatment, the products can and should be managed according to RCRA rules.
- Publication of a treatment procedure in a book or peer-reviewed journal is one reasonable basis to accept a treatment procedure unless later publications have rejected it. In the case of a “homegrown” treatment procedure, the lab should have information that assures treatment is safe and effective and that EH&S or the lab is properly identifying the RCRA status of materials emerging from the treatment process.
- Experienced lab workers are often the best sources of judgments about the safety of chemical reactions.
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Workers are competent to perform the treatment
- Base verification of worker competence with respect to RCRA needs to be measured against information actually needed to perform the treatment. The best way to do this is to question the worker. If the worker knows essential information or can retrieve it quickly, training is adequate. If not, the employer may present training records to show a good faith effort to provide training. This approach emphasizes actual worker knowledge over attendance at training.
- There should be recorded evidence that supervisors periodically evaluate worker knowledge and quickly correct deficiencies. Correcting deficiencies should accept a wide variety of individual, classroom and technological methods. This approach avoids unnecessarily repetitive classroom or other training sessions.
- Workers quickly identify errors and take adequate action to remediate damage and prevent future errors. The program records errors, remedial action and preventive action for future reference.
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Information about procedures used and their results
- Laboratory workers keep notebooks that record this information. A legible, properly maintained lab notebook is the complete, original, best and easiest documentation of laboratory procedures and results.
What treatments are prohibited?
Evaporation of hazardous materials to the atmosphere for purposes of disposal is a prohibited environmental release. (Nonetheless, evaporation of non-hazardous materials is an important method of waste reduction.)
Thermal destruction such as incineration is subject to special regulations. Heating materials to accelerate chemical reactions is necessary in some cases and should not be confused with incineration.
Dilution is not permissible, except in rare instances to meet Land Disposal Requirements. When a RCRA waste is diluted for the purpose of disposal, the entire volume is subject to the same rules as the original waste.
Should EPA regulate the lab safety aspects of waste treatment processes?
The focus of hazardous waste rules, indeed, the focus of EPA rules in general has been on environmental protection and public health. In the case of chemical waste, the focus of the rules is to prevent the release of hazardous chemicals into the environment as occurred at Love Canal and many less notorious locations. The focus is in agreement with the stated policy of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act:
“The Congress hereby declares it to be the national policy of the United States that, wherever feasible, the generation of hazardous waste is to be reduced or eliminated as expeditiously as possible. Waste that is nevertheless generated should be treated, stored, or disposed of so as to minimize the present and future threat to human health and the environment.”
Generally adopted RCRA rules remain in harmony with the policy. However, the New England XL rule expands the scope of regulation to worker safety by incorporating language from the OSHA Lab Standard (29 CFR 1910.1450).[4] Of course, the XL rule applies only to three medium-size universities in New England and has not been proposed or tested in a broader setting.
Nonetheless, EPA has a clear interest in the safety of treatment procedures. This is reflected in the above discussion about the selection and testing of treatment methods.
In most laboratories, safety is regulated by OSHA through the Lab Standard (29 CFR 1910.1450). Occasionally the Hazard Communication Standard (29 CFR 1910.1200) will apply, for example in photographic darkrooms and art studios. Chemical waste falls under the OSHA rules because its hazards are chemical in nature. Furthermore, laboratory people do not distinguish between the hazards of wanted and unwanted chemicals.
Unfortunately, there is an important dissonance between OSHA and EPA rules. OSHA rules do not protect public employees unless the state has an enforcement agreement with the agency. EPA rules apply to all public and private organizations. The difference in applicability is very clear and emerged from the political process that created each set of laws. In addition, OSHA rules do not explicitly require training in spill control and emergency procedures, although one can easily argue that such training is necessary to protect people who work with hazardous chemicals.
The regulatory dissonance between OSHA and EPA means that, to avoid regulatory overlap, EPA will need to adopt language equivalent to the OSHA Lab Standard to be conditionally applied to any organization that is not OSHA regulated. Extension to additional types of operations such as photographic darkrooms and art studios will be needed. Explicit requirements for spill control and emergency procedures may also be added.
Harmonizing new EPA rules with OSHA rules will minimize the burden and help prevent contradictory rules. Rules that measure performance instead of specifying actions will also help minimize overlap issues.
