Pollutant Source Reduction: Part II - Chemical Handling

This article deals with pollution control through source reduction, as an alternative to waste treatment. Many treatment systems simply remove an undesirable process waste from one medium and capture it in another. For example, scrubbers on smokestacks remove Undesirable combustion products by dissolving them in water. Biodegradation of chemicals in wastewater produces sludges (solid wastes). Landfilling of sludges and solid waste has an associated potential for groundwater contamination. Thus, treatment strategies tend to create chains of waste materials which lead to expense and liability which can persist through several layers of treatment. An important alternative to treatment is source reduction. This concept looks to the textile process itself to modify the source of the waste. This series of articles deals in detail with source reduction strategies for four main types of waste; hard to treat, highly dispersible, offensiveltoxiclhazardous, and high volume wastes. Information from important literature sources'-as is reviewed. Information developed in our laboratories and in actual millspecific case histories is presented. Wastes which occur universally In textile processing will be discussed in some detail, but wastes which are specific to a particular process will be discussed in future articles in this series. In many instances, several chemical alternatives exist for textile wet processing. Details of this particular process as well as cost factors dlc. tate which is selected. Basic source reduction strategies are substitution conservation, and process optimita tion. Several such situations arc described in the following. I