Industrial Solid Waste

Industrial Solid Waste is fast becoming a massive challange to manage. Industrial Solid Waste out put has increased drastically over the last few decades. The following article talks about Industrial Solid Waste.

Industrial Solid Waste

Solid Waste generally refers to any garbage, refuse,sludge, and other discarded or salvageable materials, including solid,liquid,and sami-solid materials resulting from industrial, commercial, mining, and agricultural operations, and from community activities. This does not include solids or dissolved materials in domestic sewage, dissolved or suspended solids in industrial waste water effluent, or other common water pollutants.

Solid waste management  refers to its scientific management after generation, reuse, and recycling, up to treatment and disposal. In this paper, management of industrial solid waste is discussed with reference to the hazardous waste generated from industrial sources in a manner to avoid its adverse impact on human health and the environment.

The WHO(World Health Organization), UNEP(United Nation Environment Programme), and the World Bank formulated a working defination of hazardous waste as any waste, excluding domestic  and radio-active waste, which, because of its quantity and physical, chemical, and infectious characteristics can cause a significant hazard to the human health and/or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, or disposed.

The Indian regulation has defined hazardous waste in line with the requirement of the Basel Convention, as follows.

Hazardous waste means any waste which, by reason of any of its physical, chemical, reactive, toxic, flammable, explosive, or corrosive characteristics, causes danger or is likely to cause danger to health or the environment, whether by itself or in contact with other waste or substances. Such waste includes the following.

(a)    Wastes listed in column 3 of schedule 1 of the Hazardous Waste (Management and Handling) Amendment Rules, 3003,

(b)   Wastes having constituents listed in schedule 2 of the rules if their concentration is equal to or more than the limit indicated in the said schedule, and

(c)    Wastes listed in lists ‘A’ and ‘B’ of schedule 3 (Part A) applicable only in case(s) of import or export of hazardous waste in accordance with Rules 12, 13, and 14 if they possess any of the hazardous characteristics listed in part B of schedule 3.

Rapid urbanization and industrialization in india have resulted in an increased need for proper disposal of industrial waste. The industrial sactor in India has quadrupled in size in the past three decades. There has been a significant increase in the industrial sectors such as pesticides, drugs and pharmaceuticals, textiles, dyes fertilizer, tanneries, paint, chloralkali, etc., which have a major potential for generation of hazardous wastes.

Hazardous waste from these sectors contain heavy metals, cyanides, pesticides, complex aromatic compounds, and other chemicals that are toxic to humans, plants, or animals and are flammable, corrosive, explosive, or have a high chemical reactivity. Hazardous waste contribution from industrial sources is also critical due to the wide geographical spread of industrial sources is also critical due to the wide geographical spread of industrial units in the country, thereby leading to region-wide impacts.

Hazardous waste when not adequately  handled and disposed, can cause immediate short-term public health problems as well as long-term environmental contamination and degradation of natural resources. A proper treatment and disposal of such hazardous waste is much more expensive and complex than dealing with the conventional or non-hazardous wastes/residues.

Experiences in a number of developed countries suggests that cleaning up of hazardous wastes is much more expensive in the long term as compared to its prevention at the source. For instance, in the United states, cleaning of improperly managed wastes has been estimated to cost 10-100 times as much as proper early management (Hwa 2002). It is therefore, essential for the industrialized states of india to improve the monitoring and enforcement measures, and the physical infrastructure needed for their effective implementation, while promoting recycling, recovery of materials, and avoidance of generation of hazardous wastes.