Concise Handbook of Waste Treatment Technologies

Saleh S. Al Arni, Mahmoud M. Elwaheidi

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000325768
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

With specialized and succinct coverage, Concise Handbook of Waste Treatment Technologies provides readers with an integrated overview of various waste treatment technologies and related issues. Rather than dealing separately with each type of waste material, the book summarizes important waste treatments from a holistic perspective.

• Presents a comprehensive review of the most used terminologies and methods in waste management
• Explains how waste materials are treated and managed in a manner compatible with engineering, health, safety, and environmental regulations and laws
• Includes discussion of basic solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes
• Accessible to both specialists and non-specialists

This guidebook is written for early career professionals, non-specialists, and specialists in environmental and chemical engineering and related disciplines seeking to understand proper waste and management and disposal techniques.

1

General Concept of Waste Management

Key Learning Objectives

•Understanding the terminology used in waste management.

•Understanding the basic concept of technologies used for waste treatment.

1.1 Introduction

This chapter briefly discusses the concepts of waste, waste treatment technologies, nature of waste and the ways it is produced. There is a strong relationship between waste generation and urbanization. The generated waste must be treated to reduce its hazardous health, safety and environmental effects. Waste treatment depends on a set of organizational, structural and technical measures. It also depends on the available economic means and the adapted waste management policies. The scope of waste management is to delay natural resource consumption by applying certain practices starting from resource points and extending to recovery stations. The main necessity is to enrich the resources that are depleted due to rising population and higher consumption rates.

1.2 Terminology

Variety, quality and quantity of waste materials imposed the use of various terminologies that will be dealt with in detail in the chapters of this book. The term waste is commonly used in any human activity. The use of this term becomes more complicated due to the enormous technological and industrial developments that continually add new products, producing new types of waste. However, the term waste can be defined as unusable or discarded materials sorted from human activity and intended to be disposed of anyway.

Literature contains many terms associated with waste such as landfill, compost, refuse, garbage, dust and litter. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary makes a clear distinction between rubbish, garbage, trash and refuse:

Rubbish is the usual word in British English for the things that you throw away because you no longer want or need them. Garbage and trash are both used in North American English. Inside the home, garbage tends to mean waste food and other wet material, while trash is paper, cardboard and dry material. In British English, you put your rubbish in a dustbin in the street to be collected by the dustmen. In North American English, your garbage and trash go in a garbage/trashcan in the street and is collected by garbage men/collectors. Refuse is a formal word and is used in both British English and North American English. Refuse collector is the formal word for a dustman or garbage collector.

[¹]

Definition of waste in Basel Convention^* (Article 2, paragraph 1) is “substances or objects which are disposed of or are intended to be disposed of or are required to be disposed of by the provisions of national law” [²].

Also, Junk word refers to things that are considered useless or of little value, and litter word refers to small pieces of rubbish or garbage such as paper, cans and bottles that people have left lying in the public place; in other words, these are the wastes that are not put in the correct bin.

The term waste management is related to the process of monitoring waste materials starting from minimization/prevention through collection, transport, recycling, treatment and disposal. This includes all types of waste materials such as solids, liquids, gaseous and radioactive waste.

Waste treatment includes several activities such as organizational, structural and technical waste treatment measures, controlled landfilling, thermal treatment, biological treatment, recycling mechanical treatment and economic aspect. Local government is responsible for managing nonhazardous residential, commercial and institutional waste materials. However, managing hazardous and industrial waste materials is the generator’s responsibility, subject to local laws.

The term disposal refers to intentional burial, deposit, discharge, dumping, placing or release of any waste material into or on any air, land or water. Disposal in Basel Convention (Annex IVB of the Basel Convention) means “any operation which may lead to resource recovery, recycling, reclamation, direct re-use or alternative uses”.

In this book, the term waste refers to an unusable or unwanted material that is sorted from human activity and intended to be disposed of anyway. In literature, different words such as “toxic, poisonous, chemical, and special” were used to refer to waste. We use the term hazardous waste, which means any waste or materials that pose a threat to human health and/or the environment; typically, this covers all types of hazardous materials including radioactive waste. The hazardous waste must be treated and disposed of separately from nonhazardous waste.

1.3 This Book

This book discusses waste and waste treatment methods. In general, the scope of waste management is to reduce the effect of waste on human health, safety, environment or aesthetics. This will be discussed in Chapter 2. Reducing waste material effects depends on their severity and should be dealt with by national and international laws, and this topic will be discussed in Chapter 3. Waste treatment processes depend on the waste categories and the technologies applied. There are many categories of waste, for example, solid, liquid, gaseous, hazardous, nonhazardous and degradable; these will be discussed in Chapter 4.

Chapter 5 will discuss waste management hierarchy. Waste processing and treatment includes many different processes, including mechanical, thermal and biological processes. Each technology depends on the sub-treatment of waste materials. Chapter 6 will address these processes and waste disposal methods.

Some specific industrial waste needs special treatment; any treatment depends on several parameters, including state of the material. Industrial solid, industrial liquid and industrial effluent gas will be discussed in Chapters 7–11. Chapter 12 will discuss the economic impact of waste treatment.

Review Questions

Define the following terms:

Waste

waste treatment process

waste disposal

* The Basel Convention is an international regulation for transboundary movements of hazardous materials and other wastes between nations. It was signed on 22 March 1989, and has entered into force on 5 May 1992, in July 2011 there were 175 parties.

References

1.Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, new edition online, http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com.

2.Basel Convention: Instruction manual on the prosecution of illegal traffic of hazardous waste or other waste, 2012, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), www.basel.int.

2

Waste Impact on Health and Environment

Key Learning Objective

•Understanding the impacts of waste on human health, safety and the environment.

2.1 Introduction

Waste materials cause pollutions in air, land and water. There are many different substances emitted from waste that consists principally of methane and carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfides, a mixture of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, metals such as mercury vapor, pesticides and pathogens. These pollutants should be classified based on their degree of toxicity or other hazards and their persistence in the environment. Thus, waste management (such as the collection, transport processing and disposal of waste) is considered a very critical issue that affects public health.

2.2 Impacts of Waste on Human Health

Waste materials that are generated by hospitals, health care centers, medical laboratories and research centers require special treatment since they could be sources of major health hazards to human health, for example, infections and spreading of diseases.

Health and environmental impacts of waste are associated with the release of traces of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Author Biographies
• 1 General Concept of Waste Management
• 2 Waste Impact on Health and Environment
• 3 Waste Related Laws, Regulations and Standards
• 4 Classification of Waste Materials
• 5 Waste Management Hierarchy
• 6 Solid Waste Management
• 7 Waste Treatment Processes
• 8 Biowaste Solid Materials Treatment
• 9 Waste Disposal by Thermal Processes
• 10 Industrial Wastewater Treatment
• 11 Effluent Gas Control: Clean-up System
• 12 Economics of Waste Treatment and Management
• Index