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Re: A 55 gallon drumshop?



Mark Kinsler  <kinsler@bobcat.ent.ohiou.edu> wrote:

re a discussion of the storage of heat with lots of water-filled drums:

>  Clean out the drums very well, and try to make sure that your efforts
>are very well documented.  Why?  Because a lot of old drums buried on a
>piece of residential property is going to set environmental alarms all the
>way up to the Superfund.

Thanks for reminding me about this aspect. I wouldn't bury them, BTW...

>The government and your neighbors will find you or your heirs and give
>intense trouble because they'll think you were burying toxic wastes
>in the neighborhood. 

I do worry about this sometimes. I know that unscrupulous people sometimes
bury drums full of horrible things, eg Jimmy Hoffa, and that the EPA doesn't
like to see even empty drums without bungs around industrial sites, and that a
lot of companies worry that an empty drum with their name on it will somehow
get filled up with horrible stuff and buried, and then unearthed by ghoulish
lawyers. But I coast along naively believing that if I am actually doing no
harm, truth will eventually triumph over bureaucracy :-) Of course, there may
be trouble in between...

This brings to mind an unrelated matter that happened years ago. I was being
frivolously sued by the State of Pennsylvania, the DER, in fact. After months
and months and hoards of bureaucrats traveling from Harrisburg to Philadelphia
for meetings, I said to the Deputy Attorney General, "Look, how about this:
you win, and I pay you $1." He said "We can't settle for that. We've spent too
much effort on this case. That would look very bad." Vietnam comes to mind. Or
perhaps Bosnia. So we settled for 30 cents on the dollar, $900, total, a number
that made him happy, altho it didn't pay for all the bureaucrat-hours. Also a
number that my lawyer said would be the minimum amount necessary for me to go
to trial and win. This was an interesting exercise, but not one I'd care to
repeat. Having been through this sort of thing once, the prospect of doing
something like this again is not too scary for me. One just has to derail the
bureaucrats up front, somehow, I guess, so they don't lose face. Paperwork
sounds like a good idea :-) Everything has risks.

My drums come from a food processing plant, and their contents have
mostly been things like USP grade proplylene glycol ("edible antifreeze"?),
vegetable oil for frying, soap, bleach, sodium hydroxide, sauterne wine,
and lately potassium lactate. A few days ago, I emptied about 2 gallons of
60% potassium lactate (is this some kind of milklike product?) on the ground
in the parking lot of the food plant, and one of the employees rushed out and
took a sample of my chemical spill as it ran toward the grate and said "Don't
DO that! We get FINED for that. That grate goes into a stream, and there are
FISH in the stream." He went on to tell me that the lactate product was more
damaging to the stream than the glycol, which seemed odd. But I said OK I
won't do that... I guess anything is harmful, in sufficient concentration.

When I found out that my local trash hauler would not accept 55 gallon drums,
I thought about how to get I might rid of the drums I have, if I wanted to do
that, and checked around. When is a drum a drum? If I were to rent a torch and
cut up all the drums into half drums, would the trash hauler take those?
Quarter drums? Etc...

There is a local market for 55 gallon drums. Used metal drums sell for about
$1 each, a bit more for plastic, transportation not included, at a local farm
auction, via ads in the paper, garage sales, etc. US Plastics used to sell new
55 gallon drums for about $20 each, plus UPS. Local drum recyclers sell cleaned
drums for about $15 each. One local "recycler" will accept deheaded drums if
you pay them $75/ton, one ton minimum. Another will pay about a penny a pound 
for them as scrap metal, cut up, or more if they are intact, and they have
been to an EPA-certified drum cleaner, and each drum has its very own EPA-
traceable certificate of cleanliness. Another will take a simple statement
from me that I cleaned them.

The white plastic drums that I have have a phone number on the side, a national
clearinghouse/referral center for information about drum recycling, Russell-
Stanley in Nitro, WV, at (800) DRUM-CYCLE. Calling that number yielded a number
for Recycle, Inc. in South Plainfield, NJ, at (908) 756-2200. They have been in
business since 1987. This October, they recycled 59,781 drums and gave their
owners EPA certificates of cleaning and destruction. They carefully clean each
drum upside down on a conveyor belt, as it is dragged along by nozzles sticking
into the bungholes. Then they shred the steel drums and sell the steel to
people who make reinforcing rods for concrete. They pulverize plastic drums
and sell the plastic to people who make sewer pipe. This costs the drum owners
about $2 each, if the drums are labeled and last contained food processing 
products, and they have been rinsed out. It costs about $3 each if they have
not been rinsed out first. A hundred miles of transportation adds another $200
per truckload, ie about $1/drum, in a truck that holds about 260 drums, or 
more if they are plastic drums that have been cut in half horizontally, and
perhaps slit up the side so they can be nested. Steel drums are just stacked
3-high in the truck.

So there is a potential for local solar enthusiasts to save local companies
some money, if they "recycle" their empty drums. A nice little synergy...

National mail-order solar heating kits might work better with stackable
containers, in UPS-sized packages, to reduce UPS transportation costs. 
Perhaps 5 gallon plastic paint buckets with lids, or rectangular racks of
molded plastic containers. Two-liter soda bottles are not too hard to collect
locally. New, they cost on the order of 10 cents each. Less than a dollar
sometimes, when filled with soda. Stackable hard plastic racks to hold 8
of them cost about $3 each. Some have a 1 1/8" square hole in the middle
of each rack, for a pipe or a wire to keep the stack from falling over.

>  It happened in Ohio a few years ago.  Guy bought a house and found lots
>of drums under his sun porch.  Called the state EPA, which brought in
>equipment and personnel from here to hell.  Even after they figured out
>that the drums were there to add thermal mass to the sun porch, they were
>able to make a case for their efforts because there was some residue in
>the drums. 

Which they probably felt obliged to do, so as not to have wasted all their
efforts. I'm sure it was very reassuring to the neighbors, to have an opinion
based on all that equipment and personnel... 

>  Weird, no?  I learned of this from a presentation on hazardous waste 
>presented by an official of the Columbus, OH fire department last year.  
>So watch it.

OK. Thanks for the warning...

Nick


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