QUALITY CONTROL IN RESOURCE RECOVERY FROM
INDUSTRIAL AND MUNICIPAL WASTE
Robert M. Eastman, Professor
Department of Industrial Engineering
University of Missouri
Columbia, Missouri 65211
INTRODUCTION
One way to dispose of the huge volumes of scrap and waste generated by U. S. society
today is to recycle waste into usable raw materials. This has two benefits: the waste disappears without resort to landfill or other disposal method and the resulting products do not
require virgin  raw  materials and  may  be cheaper and more energy-efficient to produce.
Unfortunately, the resource recovery industry has not expanded as rapidly nor as widely
as its proponents had hoped. One reason is economic-raw materials from waste sources
may be too expensive to collect and process. Another major limitation has been quality.
Raw materials recovered from solid waste may have so many impurities that the cost of
processing is too high to be economic. Furthermore, low quality input results in operating
problems such as energy inefficiency, equipment damage, unacceptable pollution and low
grade output.
The quality of recovered resources is defined as the characteristics which affect their
usefulness in the production of usable materials from industrial and municipal solid waste.
Quality standards for resource recovery have been and are being developed [1,2]. Further
progress can be expected as we gain more operating experience with resource recovery and
with raw material production from recovered resources.
BACKGROUND
The beginning of statistical quality control was memorandum by Walter A. Shewhart of
Western Electric Company in 1924. He later expanded the memo into a book in 1931 [3].
The U. S. Army Ordnance Department applied the statistical approach to ammunition testing
which could be done only on a sampling basis. During World War II, statistical quality control
was expanded to war production to save time and skdled personnel whde at the same time
maintaining or improving quality. Since then, statistical quality control has been extended
to most manufacturing and to many non-manufacturing activities.
Mock [4] discusses some of the production problems resulting from recovered raw
materials. For example, stainless steel scrap must be strictly controlled and tested to insure
that the final product composition meets standard specifications. Alloys in many steel
products produce harmful effects such as a aluminum pinholes in cast steel. Part of the
resource recovery research effort is directed at better data and understanding of the influence
of impurities and at developing better methods for producing quality output from resource
recovery operations.
THE PROBLEM
The central objective addressed in this paper is increasing the usefulness of resources
recovered from industrial and municipal solid waste through quality control procedures.
Auxiliary objectives include technology to improve the quality of recovered resources and
better methods for utdizing recovered resources at existing quality level or at levels which
may reasonably be expected from  better quality  through presently known technology.
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