The Different Ways to Manage Hazardous Waste

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There are at least 1000 different chemical created each year, out of all existing chemicals, 60,000 alone were created in the United States and this dependency on chemicals by the industrial society creates many problems. According to U.S. Environment Protection Agency [U.S. EPA], 35,000 types of all existing chemicals are considered hazardous to human health and the environment (as cited in Shah, 2000). Hazardous wastes are materials that consist of chemical constituents which can easily harm the environment, exposing human and other living things to diseases or even death if it is incorrectly used or managed (U.S. EPA, 2011). Hazardous wastes, which contain dangerous compositions, can exist in many different forms such as liquids, solids, gaseous or slush. This hazardous waste can also be unwanted or leftover of business products like cleaning fluids or pesticides (Satarkar, 2008). In order to avoid disastrous impacts on the environment, it is necessary to manage and control them properly (EnviroServ Waste Management, n.d.). There are different ways of management, storage, treatment, disposal and control of hazardous waste.

To manage hazardous waste, one must first learn to identify the waste, know its categories and also the hierarchy of hazardous waste. A material is regarded as hazardous wastes when it has either been categorized as an admixture of hazardous waste and non-hazardous solid waste, or an admixture of characteristic hazardous waste and special nuclear material, or remainder of treatment, storage, disposal waste, or the U.S. EPA had stated the product as so (Shah, 2000). There are four categories of hazardous waste, which are, characteristic wastes, listed wastes, universal wastes and mixed wastes (U.S. EP...

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