Waste management - part two: start at the beginning.

Before long, it seems, about the only thing that's going to be disposable is your income. Personally, I think time is running out on that too.

Anyway, speaking of disposal, last month in this space we spoke of waste management and the growing difficulty of disposing of spent foundry sand and other materials. Also discussed were the possibilities offered by reclamation and reuse technologies in dealing with wastes.

A friend of mine who is in the business of developing and marketing sand reclamation equipment stopped in a couple of weeks ago to talk about the growing disposal problems facing American foundries. He pointed out that I had missed the most important point in effectively managing industrial wastes. That is, he said, waste minimization. If you don't create a waste, you don't have to deal with it. But more realistically, the less waste you create, the less you have to dispose of or treat.

A few years ago, the National Association of Recycling industries launched a promotional campaign around the theme "Design for Recycling.' The idea was to create an awareness among manufacturers of the need to consider the ultimate destiny of their products during the design stage. Too many, in fact, are designed to ultimately find their way to the garbage heap.

It goes without saying that disposing of nearly anything and everything is becoming an increasingly less attractive and expensive alternative. Today, recycling and reuse have become more than the empty buzzwords they were a decade ago. The point of the Design for Recycling' program was to urge manufacturers to consider the ease of recycling and reuse when they design their products.

While foundries along with steel mills are the ultimate recyclers when it comes to reusing metals and many other materials, we too, can and should take a cue from this program. While we necessarily have to rely on our suppliers to help out by providing products that are safe to use and easy to recycle or reclaim, foundries can help themselves as well.

The first step in waste minimization is process control. With core and mold sand making up more than 60% of the nearly 10 million tons of materials disposed by foundries each year, this is easily the best place to start.

How?

One example is the amount of binders used in our sand. If we can produce cores and molds with 1.5% binder, why are we using 2%? In addition to the direct cost savings from using smaller amounts of binder, less must be removed during reclamation. The overuse of binders has also been known to lead to certain casting defects. And keep in mind that even when we reclaim these sands, the reclamation process itself produces residual materials that also must be disposed.

Another example offered by my visitor was how one foundry discovered that it could use round flasks instead of the conventional square or rectangular ones. This resulted in less sand handling and mixing while reducing the binder content, and reclamation and disposal needs.

I'm sure there are plenty of other innovative ideas and practices that foundries are using to reduce their disposal requirements. Clearly, the most effective waste management programs begin with waste minimization. Reuse, as we discussed on this page last month, should be our second alternative, reclamation the third, and disposal our last resort.

Economics has traditionally been the main criteria on which we make decisions and seek alternatives, but as was pointed out last month, this choice is rapidly taking a backseat to rules and regulations. Making every effort to head off a potentially negative situation before it becomes a problem is the ultimate challenge of management.

David P. Kanicki, Publisher/editor