Every wall, every car--almost every object we come in contact with--has some sort of paint or surface coating. With the growth and sophistication of the paint and surface coating industries have come environmental and health concerns. Most of thes...
Mechanical pulping methods avoid many of the environmental impacts created by the Kraft pulping process. Several different mechanical pulping methods are commonly used today, but they all rely primarily on energy rather than chemicals to convert wo...
As industries began to proliferate around the Great Lakes and its tributaries, contamination also began to accumulate in its waters. PCBs, which do not biodegrade, were routinely discharged into the environment before scientific evidence revealed th...
The ongoing maintenance of equipment and machines essential to the sugar production process can generate waste streams that require treatment. For example, some petroleum-based solvents leach hazardous metals, like chrome or lead, out of equipment ...
Americans dispose of more than two hundred million tons of trash each year, and a significant percentage of that is food packaging. As the public has become increasingly concerned about the negative impact of this massive scale of waste disposal, M...
Citrus fruits are a major part of crop production in Florida. At Southern Gardens Citrus, one of the largest citrus processing plants in the United States, a number of practices are utilized to assure both a high quality product and a safe environm...
Pyrolysis is a process that uses heat in an oxygen starved atmosphere to treat wood pulp, paper, plastic and other hydrocarbons like the mountains of discarded tires that clutter hillsides.
Extremely high temperatures are needed to decompose the most persistent, harmful, and even radioactive materials. One solution is the Plasma Arc Torch, which achieves the highest temperatures yet attained for the thermal destruction of waste. The ...
The valuable mineral borax was discovered in California's Death Valley in 1882. Today, fifty percent of the world's commercially produced borax comes from the Mojave Desert near Boron, California. Borates are used in hundreds of products and play ...
Sulfuric acid is the most commonly used compound produced by the chemical industry. It is most frequently utilized in the making of fertilizers, but is also used in the manufacture of gasolines, dyes and industrial explosives, as well as in other c...