Business Ideas

A New Approach to Wastewater Disposal:
Cost-Effective Solutions for Non-Hazardous Industrial Wastewater Generators

Formed in 2005, NewStream is an environmental services company specializing in high technology industrial wastewater treatment and high purity process water. Originally built for Texas Instruments (TI), the facility has a treatment capacity of up to 800 gallons per minute of wastewater and the ability to deliver 325 gpm of high purity process water.

The founders of NewStream have transformed the former single-user facility (formerly Texas Instruments)into a successful commercial enterprise. Having received the first permit of its type ever to be issued in Massachusetts, NewStream now receives an average of 10 truckloads per day of non-hazardous wastewater from off-site sources. Additionally, the same network of pipelines that once allowed all of TI’s on-site manufacturing operations to send their wastewater to the plant now allows NewStream to treat wastewater from tenants on site.

As a result, the facility was able to maintain an on-site surface water discharge for the majority of its wastewater effluent under a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit, meaning that water discharged from the facility will not harm even the most sensitive aquatic organism. With additional flows that discharged to the City of Attleboro sewer system under a pretreatment permit, the facility processed up to 0.75 MGD.

Sam Butterfield of Butterfield Environmental Corporation (BEC) in Plymouth, MA, then a supplier and consultant to TI and a veteran of the industrial wastewater industry in New England, saw an opportunity to grow his business and put the high-tech plant to good use. He joined forces with John Theriault, former Chief Operator of the treatment plant for TI, and now co-owner and VP of Operations for NewStream.

The path was clear that NewStream would have to work as a non-hazardous waste management and recycling facility, or not at all. However, since non-haz wastestreams are loosely tracked at best, and industry knowledge is closely guarded, concrete market data was practically impossible to obtain. Research was limited largely to anecdotal sources. Estimates of over-the-road non-haz wastewater volumes ranged from “not that much” to “huge”, and disposal pricing ranged from $0.05 to $1.25 per gallon. On the other hand, both present and potential generators of non-haz wastewater (and other, potentially recyclable, industrial/commercial materials) ranged wide and deep, all the way from large process industries to flooded basements and everything in between. With no way of quantifying just how much water there was or what NewStream’s market share could be, jumping into the market required a great leap of faith.

On the regulatory front, the Massachusetts DEP had no precedent for this type of permit since it was the first of its kind ever to be issued in the state, and MADEP’s interpretation differed from the EPA’s as to how the facility would be qualified. For example, was it a CWT (Centralized Waste Treatment) facility, and thereby allowed to accept waste from off-site sources, or not? The City of Attleboro also weighed in with a good deal of anxiety about what exactly qualifies as non-hazardous wastewater and how it would affect their own POTW.

Other questions included: Would existing technology and configuration of the plant be sufficient to treat the variety of waste streams that could potentially be received at the plant? Would it be feasible to separate the wastewater treatment plant from a site that had grown so organically over the years?

With many of these questions still unanswered, NewStream opened its doors – and its pipelines – to off-site wastewater in July of 2005 with the issuance of a new sewer discharge permit from the MADEP and the City of Attleboro.

Diversification

During the first full year of operation, several opportunities arose for NewStream to expand is service offerings. Most significant was utilizing the tremendous resources of the former TI environmental group for specialized environmental services such as decommissioning and decontaminating industrial facilities. A good deal of work was done for TI as it transitioned out of its manufacturing operations, as well as other companies who heard about NewStream’s expertise in these areas. Services have since been expanded to include contract operation of other industrial water and wastewater treatment facilities, chemical management and environmental monitoring.

Another addition to the service and product line was antifreeze recycling. As a non-haz material, NewStream could accept used antifreeze, collected in small bulk from auto dealerships, service centers and fleet vehicles, process it to recover ethylene glycol, and produce a recycled anti-freeze product for sale back into the automotive market. Rather than investing large capital expenditures for new equipment, NewStream was able to convert one of its three large and sophisticated Reverse Osmosis (RO) units from the plant’s high purity water process into a nano-filter for glycol recovery. The addition of a small Ion Exchange system for chloride removal was all that was needed to allow NewStream to recover a high quality recycled product from the used material.

The recovered product is then refreshed with virgin ethylene glycol, corrosion inhibitors, and dye packages to meet customer specifications. The recycled antifreeze can be shipped from NewStream in bulk or drums at very competitive prices.

NewStream’s goal is to generate recycled material that is as high quality as virgin material. The recycled material can be sold back to the generator and/or to third parties for re-use in applications such as:

? Major auto and truck manufacturing
? Aftermarket automotive service
? Consumer use (retail)
? Fed, state, local government use
? Military applications

Other processes on the drawing board include recovery of clean “Specification Used Oil Fuel” (a “regulated recyclable” material under Mass regulations) from water-contaminated tank bottoms and the like, recovery of recyclable gasoline from gas/water mixtures, and recovery of oil and recyclable metals from used oil filters.

Process Challenges and Modifications

Once the permits were in place, the word was out and the water started flowing in, many challenges still remained. The naïve assumption was that since this sophisticated plant, with all its technology, could treat almost any type of hazardous wastewater, any non-hazardous wastewater would be handled with ease. That was not the case: the NewStream team was surprised at the diversity and complexity of the waste streams that were coming in, and by the high volume of high-strength organic wastestreams. Many streams, such as latex waste from the textile industry, had peculiar characteristics that demanded special processing. Others came with odor problems. All streams had to be screened carefully for hidden toxicity characteristics that might pass through to the POTW.

NewStream quickly began a series of process modifications that would allow for optimum efficiency and treatment performance in the plant. The most significant improvement was the addition of eight 10,000-gallon holding tanks. The tank farm enables the Company to isolate, analyze and batch treat each individual waste stream as it comes off the truck.

The primary advantage to the tank farm system is the guarantee that each and every load arriving at the plant will receive optimum pre-treatment to remove a large bulk of contaminants prior to being equalized with other waste streams. The tank farm allows for greater cost efficiency and in general, better control of the treatment process.

Each new waste stream coming into the plant now receives its own unique treatment recipe. The recipe goes on record in a sort of operators’ cookbook, which is followed each time a load of the given stream comes in. Ultimately, the batch treatment process will be automated, allowing operators to plug in a waste profile number to the programmable logic controller (PLC) and automatically treat the entire batch. This method will eliminate operator error and provide for better control over chemical dosage rates, mixing speeds and times.

Automated batch treatment works with a variety of different treatment processes, including gravity clarification, chemical oxidation, dissolved air flotation and even biological treatment methods, such as a moving bed bio-reactor (MBBR).

The MBBR is another new technology that NewStream expects to put online in 2007. (At this writing, a pilot-scale system is being successfully operated at the plant.) The bioreactor will enable NewStream to treat waste streams with high biological oxygen demand (BOD) by converting contaminants into organic mass and gases.

Specifically, the MBBR technology being tested at NewStream uses thousands of biofilm carriers operating in mixed motion to increase the surface area for attached fixed film bacteria. The system offers higher productivity than many other biological systems in use today.

WEF 6/8/2007 6 Cost Effective Solutions for Non-Hazardous Industrial Wastewater

Other process modifications included retrofitting the existing reverse osmosis (RO) unit as mentioned above in the discussion about antifreeze recycling, and converting two 10,000-gallon tanks for removal of any non-emulsified oil and grease prior to chemical treatment.

Quality Control

In order to maintain the high standards of treatment expected of NewStream, strict quality control has been critical. Before accepting any waste stream, NewStream’s Quality Control Manager performs extensive treatability testing to:

1. Pre-screen incoming wastestreams to establish influent levels of several contaminants, including metals – utilizing a direct coupling plasma (DCP) unit – as well as COD, TSS, and pH.

2. Determine whether the stream can be treated effectively enough to meet NewStream’s discharge permit limits, and

3. Establish a treatment “recipe” for each stream to be optimally batch treated (as discussed above).

Once accepted for processing at the facility, QC must be maintained throughout receiving, treatment and discharge processes. This is accomplished with the use of a Receiving Log that travels with the retain sample and the load itself through the process, getting multiple QC checks at critical points along the way, until it is finally cleared for discharge from the plant.

A COST COMPARISON

So, when does it make sense for a non-hazardous industrial wastewater generator to truck their water off site to NewStream, as opposed to building and operating their own on-site wastewater treatment plant?

An example: NewStream has a customer that manufactures several different health and beauty products. Upon introducing a new product line, the company was notified that they were now in violation of their existing sewer discharge permit. The process associated with manufacturing the new product was generating wastewater that added several new contaminants to the stream.

The company considered a complete overhaul of their existing treatment system in order to treat the wastewater generated from the new process. To do everything required to meet permit limits, the capital costs would have been $540,000. O&M costs for the system were estimated at $125,000 per year, not including sewer discharge fees. The cost to haul one truckload of wastewater per week to NewStream is $104,000 per year. In this case, the cost-benefit is clearly in favor of trucking, especially since the success of the new product line was not yet known and the company was hesitant to make the long-term investment in waste treatment equipment.

Industrial logos are a company’s face in the marketplace. These logos reflect a company’s image and, thus, impact the response of its potential customers. An industrial logo that does not aptly reflect a company’s business can actually have a negative impact on the company’s image. Good industrial logos tend to become famous and are remembered by people for times to come. Some such examples are the logos of 3M, Toyota Motors and Harley Davidson.

Now, what makes some industrial logos famous? A very high percentage of industrial logos that become famous are the ones that are simple in design, with no fancy colors or graphic designing. Some of them simply use fonts and are a combination of only one or two colors. Yet they are excellent memory triggers.

Basic Features of Good Industrial Logos

Here are some basic tips for designing good industrial logos:

Should be simple

Should not be confusing

Should represent the true nature of a company’s business

Should be attractive enough to make an instant impact on the minds of viewers

Should adhere to designing rules

Should make an appropriate use of colors, fonts and styles

Should be equally effective when produced in black and white mode as when it is in the color mode

The output should be equally effective irrespective of the size

Should not lose its attractiveness when reproduced on different mediums

Should stand out and not be a copy of an existing logo

Should reflect the long-term nature or business of the company

Industrial logos are the first step in building a brand and presenting an industrial company’s image to its prospective and existing customers and to its associates. Used in all types of communication, such as letterheads, visiting cards, banners, posters and nameplates, industrial logos need to convey an appropriate and accurate image to the targeted audience.

Designing Industrial Logos

Two options for developing industrial logos are available. In the first case, a company can choose a pre-designed template offered by any of the logo designers and modify it to put its own name. Such logos are not unique and not as effective as custom made logos. However, they are perfect for price sensitive companies. Custom made designs are the best option, since they are developed after incorporating the suggestions of both the company and the designer. While the company can present the true picture of its business and products as well as express its preference for a particular, a graphics designers knows how to convert that into good designs. Industrial logos can be designed by choosing one or a mix of designs incorporating iconic or graphic images, illustrative designs or a font-based design.

The expert team of creative graphic designers at Pixellogo Creative Designs has experience in designing and developing innovative and unique industrial logos.

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Many factories where extensive cleaning of equipment is essential suffer from either machine fatigue, use of wrong brushes, equipment being damaged during the process. This happens when the wrong brushes are used. Various plants where bottling is a daily affair need industrial brushes. There are specific requirement for the removal of dirt from the air conditioners and the ducts. Labs and pharma companies need production of formulation under specific temperatures. Even offices where many employees work together require optimal environment to work for long hours. This is where the use of industrial brushes is effective.

The kind of brushes used will determine how the air can be cleared. Various health regulations specify that that a clean environment is necessary for the well being of the workers. The clean fresh air contributes to more work in closed spaces. The ventilation systems can be a source of air pollution, respiratory diseases. They need to be sanitized and brushed often. The best way to control any kind of air contamination is by use of brushing to remove dust particles and other particles that settle from outside. The use of air jets and other brushes need to be an integral part of the maintenance unit. This also stops early corrosion of the air ducts.

Apart from air condition maintenance, there is a need of special brushes in factories and units. Places where debris is stuck, or places where the workers are exposed to hazardous machines, brushes are useful. The use of brushes that are automated can be deployed under such conditions. This reduces the manual labor and is safe. It also reduces costs in the long run. There are roller, sweeper, strip, lathe, road cleaning brushes that are customized for long haul maintenance in factories. These can be purchased or ordered through companies that make these special brushes. They can be contacted online too. These brushes are known for their durability and are also affordable. They can also be delivered and shipped anywhere in the world. Usually to get the right kind of brush made from specific material, it is essential for the company to know what the operations are where they will be applicable. Various designs are made and some companies actually prepare a design that can be tried before the order is given. This makes the products more durable and can be used straight out of the package they are shipped in. The need of international equipment to make them is important. What’s more certain type of brushes also require after sales services.

IndustrialSAVER.com, the online marketplace and auction-based classifieds to trade industrial goods and services such as machine tools, machinery, chemicals and general industrial supplies announced today its parent company Industrial Leaders launched its new roller and roller bearings directory. The company said the power transmission products marketplace includes offerings for spherical bearings, precision, ceramic, tapered, plain, sleeve, angular, radial, copper bearings, pillow block, thrust, miniature, rod end, stainless steel bearings and other types in a wide range of sizes and materials.

According to Conrad Bailey, an IndustrialSAVER spokesperson, the broad array of bearings and motion control equipment offered on the site are primarily from American manufacturers specializing in OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and customized power transmission equipment. Bailey said hundreds to thousands of bearings manufacturers and distributors can be accessed through the site specializing in roller, mounted, flanged needle bearings, metric, inch and standard sizes as well as precision, spherical, angular and other types.

“The bearings marketplace and directory was designed to focus on all phases of power transmission and allied products associated with alloy steel, stainless steel, copper, lubrication, motion control systems, engineered surfaces and other industry solutions,” said Bailey. He concluded, “Companies sourcing bearings can use the site to find offerings to meet the needs for different motions, speeds, loads, frictions, stiffness, maintenance, surfaces and equipment such as material handling systems, conveyors, machinery, motors and other applications involving rotation or linear movement.” No further information on the brands of bearings and motion control products was disclosed.

About IndustrialSAVER

IndustrialSAVER is an international online B2B marketplace for companies looking to buy and sell industrial supplies, equipment and machinery. Users are able to post and explore offerings for a wide range of industrial products and manufacturing services and other solutions for the industrial marketplace at

Over 100 Needle and Roller Bearings Manufacturers Added To Industrial Leaders