Baselining Waste-Stream Flow

Robins Air Force Base (AFB), Georgia, developed the first functional Compliance Site Inventory (CSI) in the Air Force Materiel Command. This CSI provides an organized process that enabled 2,797 compliance sites to be assigned to 169 process specific groups, such as hazardous materials and wastes, air/water pollutants, safety/health, mission impact, and past audit findings. A CSI enables the user to easily identify, rank, and program a pollution prevention effort.
   Additionally, Robins AFB uses programs like Compliance Through Pollution Prevention (CTP2) and Process Specific Opportunity Assessments (PSOAs) to help reduce the waste-stream flow. These programs configure cost-effective road maps, through the comparison of baseline conditions to alternative conditions, in order to reduce the amount of hazardous waste in depot operations. After the implementation of both PSOA and CTP2 programs, Robins AFB has successfully replaced methyl ethyl ketone in regulated sources, identified non-hazardous substances solvents for paint gun cleaning, and replaced hazardous air pollutants (HAP) in aircraft integral fuel tank cleaning operations. Plato's Process Planner ™ is one example of a plating shop PSOA that is available to the public. This planning program is a Windows-based software program that helps to provide a better understanding of a process and a variety of improvement options.
   One example of a CTP2 cleaning success is the plating shop hexavalent chrome recycling process that uses Anion Liquid Liquid Exchange technology. During normal periodic depot maintenance, various aircraft parts are stripped of their coatings (e.g., cadmium, chromium, nickel, copper, etc.), cleaned, plated, and sometimes painted. Large amounts of water are used in this plating shop process, which results in contaminated wastewater. In addition, numerous aluminum and titanium parts are milled or etched in the process, which results in further contamination. In order to treat the contaminated water, Robins AFB uses a hexavalent chrome recycling process to remove contaminants in an on-site industrial wastewater treatment plant (IWTP), which creates metal hydroxide sludge. The IWTP extracts the metals so that they will be able to be recycled independently, which saves chemical usage, production of hazardous waste, and labor.
   For more information, contact Linda Larson at (478) 926-1197, ext 137, Linda.larson@robins.af.mil.