MANAGEMENT OF RESIDUES FROM
HAZARDOUS WASTE FACILITIES
Steve E. Hrudey, Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2G7
INTRODUCTION
Alberta Needs
Currently no commercial operations provide offsite industrial waste treatment and disposal facilities within Alberta. The province has a population of 2,350,000 and an emerging petrochemical
industry based upon abundant natural gas and non-conventional hydrocarbon (oil sands) reserves.
The need for state-of-the-art hazardous waste treatment facilities within the province has been
recognized for some time. A "Hazardous Waste Management Committee," appointed in 1979,
recommended construction of an integrated waste treatment system modelled upon technology
successfully demonstrated in Europe.
In reviewing the relevant technical issues involved in operating an integrated hazardous waste
management facility, information on ultimate residues was found to be scant. In this context, residue
refers to any solid or liquid by-product of hazardous wastes which cannot be eliminated by further
treatment. By definition, residues must be disposed to an ultimate receptor. A study was initiated to
gather information on the types and quantities of residues generated from relevant treatment technologies [1]. The major source of information was on-site interviews at 44 operating hazardous waste
facilities in Europe and North America.
Waste Types
Residue generation will naturally depend upon the type of wastes to be handled. An inventory [2]
was conducted to categorize the anticipated hazardous waste profile for Alberta based upon waste
generation factors per production employee. Given the uncertainty associated with such an exercise,
this inventory was compared with three other information sources [3,4,5]. The first [3] was a survey
done for Ontario, also using computed waste quantities. The other two were derived from California,
one [4] based upon Department of Health Services manifest records and another [5] based upon
delivery records at California's largest class I landfill, BKK in West Covina. The distribution of
wastes into major categories is shown in Figure I, The hazardous waste profiles are remarkably
similar. They indicate that heavy metal solutions and residuals are the dominant category on a weight
basis with waste oils a distant second. Although these comparisons do not verify the quantities of
wastes predicted for Alberta, they do lend some support to the predicted categorization of wastes.
Relevant Technologies
Although many references have been published detailing scores of alternatives for hazardous
waste treatment, the survey of operating facilities indicated a much smaller range of treatment
technologies in actual use [6]. In fact, only 12 major categories of process technology were encountered in site visits. Of these, only 8 provided major information on residue generation. These were:
(1) neutralization; (2) oxidation; (3) reduction; (4) precipitation; (5) oil/water separation; (6)
solvent/fuels recovery; (7) activated sludge; and (8) incineration.
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