Waste Charcterisation for Landfill

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
This article (or section) may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article, especially its section layout, and relevant internal links. (help)
This article has been tagged since December 2006.

[edit] Introduction

Parts of the Hazardous Waste Directive have now been integrated into UK law and it has become the responsibility of a producer of a waste to characterise it. To this end, the Environment Agency (EA) and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA)have produced guidance on doing so. This covers categorising the waste under the List of Wastes Regulations (or European Waste Catalogue (EWC)), deciding on it's hazardous properties (if any)If the waste is hazardous further regulatory guidance covers the Waste Acceptance Criteria.

[edit] The EWC

The first step in characterising waste is to decide on the appropriate EWC code. The list of these codes is available from the Environment Agency's website in the guidance document WM2. These codes carry three categories - absolute non-hazardous, mirror entries and absolute hazardous.

Absolute hazardous entries are hazardous not due to the composition of the waste but by virtue of the process that produced it, the same is true for non-hazardous absolute entries. Mirror entries can either be hazardous or non-hazardous depending on the composition of the waste.

Deciding whether a mirror entry is hazardous or non-hazardous by composition involves refernce to the Approved Supply List (ASL) initially. If a substance is not listed in the ASL then the regulations permit the use of other sources such as Manufacturer's Safety Data Sheets (MSDS)to classify the waste. These documents contain Risk Phrases, which describe the hazards that the substance or substances present. Risk phrases have threshold values attached to them that indicate what concentration of a substance must be present in order for the waste to be classified as hazardous by the Hazard Code attached to the Risk Phrase.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../w/a/s/Waste_Charcterisation_for_Landfill_ebbc.html"