180 foundrymen explore spent sand options.

"I'm here to gather information and see what our options are," said Richard Taylor, Auburn Foundry, Inc., Auburn, Indiana. Like Taylor, many of the 180 attendees at the AFS International "Reduce, Reuse, Reclaim" Conference still landfill their spent foundry sand and were fact-finding for prospective alternatives.

Held October 14-15 in Novi, Michigan, the program featured 22 speakers and tabletop exhibits from 18 industry suppliers. Virtually every major issue and aspect of spent sand handling was touched on.

Dieter Leidel, Tanoak, Inc., Barrie, Ontario, put the industry's environmental concerns into perspective with his presentation. "Foundries consume over 10 million tons of scrap metal annually," he said, "making them one of the world's oldest and most effective recyclers. Of foundry sand--the industry's largest material stream--94% is recycled internally. If all the foundries were closed and producing 0% waste, the annual national amount of solid waste would only drop by 5%."

According to Leidel, a foundry's first priority should be waste stream source reduction. Of beneficial external reuse of spent sand, he said that it is really only an alternate for disposal, since a foundry usually ends up paying to have that sand taken off its hands. Reclamation is simpler and cheaper, and in the long run can save on new sand costs.

Of the many reclamation case studies presented at the conference, nearly all mentioned that recycled sand was of a higher quality than new sand. Speaker D.J. Couture, GM Powertrain, Saginaw, Michigan, said GM began its massive reclamation effort to save money on disposal costs and have a program in place before legislation forced it.

"What we found, though," he said, "was that casting quality was better with the reclaimed sand." GM's system is a combination of the mechanical, wet and thermal methods of reclamation. "We are in the process of becoming our own sand supplier, so we have to meet our new sand specs like any other supplier," Couture said.

Bill Petch, Armstrong Mold Corp., East Syracuse, New York, presented similar findings, but from the perspective of a small shop using only 3000 tons of sand per year: "Our sand--and probably our castings--got better," he said. "And we saw a 20% reduction in binder use."

The real benefit for Armstrong, Petch said, was in savings. The operating cost of the plant's calcining and attrition equipment is about $42,000 per year. Petch estimated that annual savings on transportation, tipping, landfilling and new sand costs are $450,000.

Throughout much of the program, emphasis was placed on changing the perception of foundry sand. Tom Jancek, RMT, Inc., Lansing, Michigan, suggested that semantics play an important role in the industry's relationship with communities, government agencies and potential users of spent sand. "Not waste, but by-product," he said, "not incinerator, but reclaimer, and not treatment but process modification."

Luncheon speaker Ed Wabiszewski Jr., Maynard Steel Casting Co., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, agreed: "We must change the paradigm. Please do not use the word waste. Use the term by-product."

He stressed that foundrymen need to take a positive view of everything that comes out of their foundties. "Sand contaminants from our foundries are now measured in parts per billion," Wabiszewski said. "A lot of these parameters have never been tested against native soil, which in many cases, is more contaminated than the sand."

Giving an overview of where sand disposal options stand, he projected disposal costs to continue to rise at 2.5 times the rate of inflation and then level off. By then, he believes, foundry by-products will be used as "primary components in the road building and construction processes."

However, the topic of external beneficial sand reuse is often confusing and contradictory. Though myriad potential reuse applications exist, matching foundry sand to the various end-users' specifications is difficult, as is gaining access to them through the thicket of state and federal regulations.

Another stumbling block is the unwillingness of potential recipients to assume responsibility for a product they have been led to believe is an environmental and health hazard. The question of liability continues to be an issue to these manufacturers, although over 95% of all spent foundry sand is non-toxic.

Yet there has been considerable progress on some fronts. The use of foundry sand in flowable fill has been approved in Ohio, while Iowa has allowed it for cement production. In Canada, it can be used for landfill cover. Additionally, some lightweight concrete manufacturers are looking into including foundry slag in their mixes.

Some of the most encouraging news on reuse came from Robert Zayko and Starr D. Kohn, S.M.E., Inc., an asphalt producer in Lansing, Michigan. After detailing the important criteria for high-quality asphalt (stability, durability, workability and flexibility), they concluded that, "Foundry residuals are a bona fide substitution for some of the present materials used in asphalt concrete.

"Asphalt companies, government agencies and others need to understand that foundry materials are environmentally and physically applicable for that substitution."