CSG Boost Safety Standards For Volatile Water Reactive Waste Treatment
26 June 2012 by Daryl Tunningley
Hazardous waste treatment specialists Cleansing Service Group (CSG) has completed a comprehensive programme to update what is believed to be the UK’s only commercial plant developed to handle volatile water reactive wastes.
The company, which has pledged to comply with BAT in all its processes, has introduced new, state-of-the art instrumentation and control systems to meet the latest updated safety standards required to handle a notoriously difficult waste stream.
The plant, installed at a cost of £400,000, is located at the company’s treatment site at Cadishead near Manchester where it was originally developed to treat antimony pentachloride mixed with chlorinated and fluorinated solvents – a catalyst arising from chemical production. Until then there had been no satisfactory disposal method for this waste.
The plant now mainly handles reactive wastes such as unstable acid chlorides arising from the manufacturing processes of pharmaceutical companies.
Unstable reactive wastes can explode or react violently, and produce toxic gases when exposed to water.
The CSG process, carried out in a 3,500 litre glass lined reactor vessel, neutralises the waste through controlled hydrolysis – a system in which water and caustic is gradually and precisely ‘drip fed’ into the waste which is converted into a weak acid solution. The neutralised waste can safely go for disposal into sewers or can itself be used as a chemical reagent.
As well as treating full drums of reactive wastes, CSG also operates specialist facilities for the decontamination of empty drums containing water reactive residues, both at Cadishead and at its Wilton site.
Cadishead Site Manager Jen Cartmell said: “More and more of our customers now rightly demand that their waste is handled through specialist treatment processes which meet the highest possible safety and environmental standards, and this is especially important in the disposal of these highly unstable chemicals.”
Picture: Chemist setting up drums in the drum decontamination unit in preparation for treatment
