Hazardous Wastes

In the United States and around the world, hundreds of thousands of industrial processes are taking place everyday.  This has been going on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since the industrial revolution in the United States.  In the United States we really do produce almost any type of product you can think of.  This means millions of tons of raw materials, chemicals, equipment, machinery etc.  Unfortunately, many chemicals and materials used in industrial processes are pretty dangerous to either humans, or the environment.  We often produce hazardous waste products that are not easily disposed of.  This has been a substantial problem for manufacturing since the industrial revolution in the US.  The general consensus used to be as follows; if a worker takes a job, they assume and accept all risk associated with that job.  Meaning if you got sick due to chemical exposure, you accepted that risk and you couldn’t put blame on the corporation.  Of course, this is not the way we think today.  We want to reduce the contact our workers have with hazardous materials and wastes as much as we possibly can.  But this is often times a more challenging task than one may think.  Unfortunately, the history of doing this has been a sort of trial and error process.  Not all exposures are as obvious as you may think.  For example dust in the air is noticeable and can be addressed fairly straightforwardly.  But things like radiation are not so easy to detect, you need special instrumentation and knowledge.  This can be seen in the industrial revolution with the women painting watches with radioactive glow paint and getting radiation poisoning.  In today’s world we are more careful but just some of the things a worker can encounter include; strong acids, strong bases, carcinogens, radioactive substances, mutagens, flammable materials, and more.  We as safety professionals are aware of the risk factors, and signs of exposure to these substances.  Many people think safety is “common sense” but chemical safety is an example that contradicts that.  Somebody not educated in this type of work may overlook exposure routes like aerosols etc.  They may overlook things like the proper container to use when working with acidic or basic chemicals.  A special container is needed to contain a strong acid or base in many settings.  If an improper container is used, a leak will result.  This leaked chemical can than eat the containers of other chemicals and cause a potentially very large problem.  These chemicals are also dangerous to the environment as wastes.  For example, landfills are known to seep harmful spent chemicals like motor oil into the soil and ground water.

  For reasons like that, we see regulations put in place over time to try and avoid these situations.  But chemicals often find their way into our environment through other routes.  An example being just down the drain in our homes.  People don’t tend to think about that as they pour things down the drain because they assume it will somehow be taken out.  But that isn’t always the case.  Even things like remnants of birth control can remain in the water even after it is treated and detected in ground water.  We as a society need to be more aware about what happens to our chemicals once we are done using them.