PLANT AND FACILITIES ENGINEERING WITH WASTE AND ENERGY MANAGEMENT:WASTE-MANAGEMENT CONCERNS FOR PLANT ENGINEERS

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6. WASTE-MANAGEMENT CONCERNS FOR PLANT ENGINEERS

6.1. Management and Legal Issues on Waste Management

Waste management, environmental law, and other environmental issues must be addressed by plant and facility engineers. The information that follows should guide a new plant engineer with an industrial engineering background in gaining control of the waste management and environmental program as quickly as possible.

Industrial engineers by definition eliminate waste, and they can apply industrial engineering meth- odology to waste reduction. Waste was paid for as part of a purchased item.

Although many managers take a nonchalant attitude toward waste management, management must realize that effective waste management can improve profitability. To prevent waste, management at all levels must learn to think of the total system or process and include waste management in all decisions. They should understand that the beginning of the waste stream is not at the trash dock, but in product design, purchasing, engineering, or even top management. It should never be assumed that any waste item cannot be eliminated, utilized more effectively, or recovered.

6.1.1. Legal Issues on Waste Management

Too often, management makes decisions about waste management based solely on avoidance of fines resulting from many environmental laws in and court decisions instead of making rational decisions based on good management practice. It behooves the plant and facilities engineer to become inti- mately familiar with all applicable environmental laws and regulations. Space in this chapter does not permit a review of laws, but some assistance can be found in Chapter 19 of this Handbook.

6.1.2. Waste Management as a Productivity or Resource-Utilization Issue

Industrial engineering by definition maximizes the utilization of resources including capital, machines, material, people, data, energy, and technology by devising innovative systems for production or service. The objective of productivity improvement is to maximize the utilization of these resources.

Waste avoidance or reduction maximizes the material resource and reduces labor and equipment requirements as a result of less handling and disposal effort.

6.1.3. Environmental and Waste-Management Productivity and Benchmarking Measures

The effectiveness of the waste-management and environmental program can be measured by applying productivity measures internally to the organization or externally as benchmarking measures to com- pare performance with similar organizations. Measures include:

Labor productivity (output / man hour) Handling equipment productivity Operations productivity

Energy productivity (output / M BTU)

Labor content of waste management activities Cost of waste handling and disposal

Value of waste handled and discarded Volume of waste handled

Weight of waste handled

Production downtime incurred (or avoided) Complaints from EPA, OSHA (or avoided) EPA fines assessed (or avoided)

Operating costs reduced

Material losses (or losses avoided) Energy saved or converted Defects avoided

Quantity or value of waste sold or exchanged

6.1.4. Economic Considerations on Waste Management

Industrial engineers learn to weigh alternative proposals using engineering economy principles. Busi- ness school graduates are often taught that there must be a short-term, bottom-line impact for an expenditure to be made. Solutions to waste-management problems may be evaluated using life-cycle costing principles with data supplied by activity-based costing. Applying waste-management and disposal costs to the justification process improves the justification dramatically. While waste disposal is a non-value-added activity, finding ways to eliminate or reduce waste at the source can produce savings through one or more of the following:

Lower labor cost Less material waste

Less expensive raw materials Reduced material-handling cost Lower energy costs Improved product quality Reduced maintenance costs Profit through waste exchange Reduced long-term liability for improper disposal, spills, and accidents Avoidance of fines for environmental noncompliance Reduced transportation, tipping fees, and disposal costs

6.2. Waste Streams and Waste Handling
6.2.1. Solid and Hazardous Waste Streams

Industrial waste streams contain nonhazardous materials such as paper, wood, metals, plastics, fibers, and food waste. Paints, some plastics, and metals may be hazardous or nonhazardous depending on their composition. Many chemicals are considered hazardous and require special disposal methods under stringently controlled conditions.

6.2.2. Solid Waste Handling

The typical solid waste stream consists of nonhazardous packaging material, cafeteria and restroom trash, office waste paper, floor sweepings, and waste materials from processing operations. When possible, material should be sent to a recycling area, with nonrecyclables going to a disposal area.

Engineers often give detailed consideration to material handling of product and raw material but often ignore handling of waste material within a plant. Consequently, default material-handling meth- ods for waste material remain primitive and labor intensive. While every effort should be made continually to eliminate waste material, an IE-oriented plant or facilities engineers should devise cost- effective or innovative methods for handling waste material that has not yet been eliminated.

Waste handling should be viewed as a non-value-added but necessary process. All waste-handling activities should be documented or mapped to determine who is spending time to handle waste and how much this activity is costing at each step by applying work measurement. From these cost data, more cost-effective methods of handling and disposal can be developed.

Simply designing a route for waste handlers to follow and monitoring their methods can improve efficiency in waste handling. Savings opportunities exist if the study finds that production people are spending time handling or disposing of waste materials while the production operation remains at a standstill. Lift trucks from production areas are sometimes used for transfering trash to disposal area, but this practice interferes with production when they are needed to deliver or remove palettes from production operations. A lift truck should be assigned to waste handling to avoid this situation, especially if distances to the disposal area is long.

Depending on the type of operation, such handling devices as dumping hoppers, tilt carts, four- wheeled carts, trailer trains, rolling waste cans, scrap conveyors, chutes, and pallets are used to move waste material for recycling or disposal. At the disposal area, waste material is sometimes placed on an open trailer or dumped into a trash compactor. A skid steer loader may also be used to load a trainer or compactor. Mechanization is desirable to reduce costs to the extent possible if waste- reduction efforts have not fully eliminated waste.

If a contractor is engaged to handle waste in the plant, the handling equipment may be owned by the contractor, who may work on a fixed-fee basis either by tonnage or hours expended. While this approach may reduce equipment investment, the contractor should indemnify against liabilities for contractor personnel and ensure that the company is compensated for damage to equipment or interruptions to production caused by the contractor.

6.3. The Industrial Engineering / Environmental Methodology

The industrial engineering-based environmental methodology outlined below is the systems approach to waste management through which industrial and plant engineers can solve environmental problems in a cost-effective and productive manner. The methodology is based on the premise that waste begins at the top management decision-making process. When top management realizes where the value stream containing waste begins, commitment to waste reduction and elimination of non-value-added activity may occur. The revised IE environmental methodology is as follows (Ross 1989, 1999):

1. Help top management understand where the waste stream begins and get support for waste- reduction and environmental-improvement programs.

2. Outline clear objectives and scope for the environmental program.

3. Get everyone involved at all levels of the organization.

4. Handle the legal issues of environment as a top priority as follows: Become familiar with all applicable laws.

Take an environmental audit to find problems before regulators arrive. Be sure all paperwork is submitted on time to avoid fines.

Implement effective environmental controls to keep the organization in the lowest possible environmental risk category.

If an inspector arrives at your facility, be cooperative and don’t try to hide anything (if you’re caught, it will cost you dearly).

Implement changes punctually.

Protest unfair citations or excessive fines.

5. Organize and train teams to address waste-reduction issues.

6. Make a process map of all activities performed in all processes.

7. Identify, quantify, and prioritize waste streams at any point in each process.

8. Implement effective waste-management tactics, including the following, which appear in de- scending order of value:

Eliminate or reduce waste streams at the source.

Redesign the product to reduce waste—use value analysis. Change processes, conditions, and procedures to reduce waste.

Reevaluate reality of quality requirements that may produce waste. Purchase good-quality, nonpolluting materials.

Insist on returnable containers—set up a container or pallet pool. Exchange waste with other companies.

Find another product to use waste productively. Segregate waste and reduce each type.

Recover resources from waste.

Reclaim, reuse, recycle wastes even if they only break even.

Find secondary outlets for waste.

Improve material handling of waste; avoid makeshift handling methods.

Improve maintenance procedures on equipment to reduce waste

Mix wastes into compost for landscaping and ground cover.

Cogenerate waste material to make electricity and reduce waste volume.

Incinerate waste material for process, water, or comfort heating.

Dispose of waste that cannot be reclaimed to a landfill as a lost resort.

9. Take a long-range perspective; don’t look for a quick fix.

10. Do justifications based on activity-based and life-cycle costing, including environmental and social costs.

11. Train people in the organization to reduce waste and reward people for exceptional effort in the environmental area.

12. Benchmark with similar organizations and emulate best waste practices.

13. Seek outside assistance such as universities and trade associations.

14. Develop or recognize economic incentives for waste reduction.

15. Make the process of waste reduction iterative and repeatedly review processes to make further waste reductions.

16. Evaluate results and make changes in the program as necessary.

By using the methodology outlined above and keeping cognizant of the many industrial engineering-related resource conservation issues, plant engineers can improve the environment, re- source productivity, organizational profitability, and quality for all stakeholders.

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