Introduction to Toxic Waste

What is Toxic Waste?

Hazardous wastes are poisonous byproducts of manufacturing, farming, city septic systems, construction, automotive garages, laboratories, hospitals, and other industries. The waste may be liquid, solid, or sludge and contain chemicals, heavy metals, radiation, dangerous pathogens, or other toxins. Even households generate hazardous waste from items such as batteries, used computer equipment, and leftover paints or pesticides.

The waste can harm humans, animals, and plants if they encounter these toxins buried in the ground, in stream runoff, in groundwater that supplies drinking water, or in floodwaters, as happened after Hurricane Katrina. Some toxins, such as mercury, persist in the environment and accumulate. Humans or animals often absorb them when they eat fish.


Reference: http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/toxic-waste-overview.html

What are the types of toxic waste?

• Listed Wastes: Wastes that EPA has determined are hazardous. The lists include the F-list (wastes from common manufacturing and industrial processes), K-list (wastes from specific industries), and P- and U-lists (wastes from commercial chemical products). 
• Characteristic Wastes: Wastes that do not meet any of the listings above but that exhibit ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity, or toxicity. 
• Universal Wastes: Batteries, pesticides, mercury-containing equipment (e.g., thermostats) and lamps (e.g., fluorescent bulbs). 
• Mixed Wastes: Waste that contains both radioactive and hazardous waste components. 
• Waste Identification Process: Details about the process for identifying, characterizing, listing, and delisting hazardous wastes.

Reference: http://www.epa.gov/osw/hazard/wastetypes/index.htm


What can it do to our world?

Many strange and unnatural mutations in animals can be linked to toxic waste. Global warming finds one source in hazardous waste and dangerous chemicals being released into the air. Ecosystems that depend upon even temperatures are thrown into disarray resulting in plant and animal species dwindling in number or becoming extinct.

Humans too are impacted not only by the change in the temperatures, climate adjustment and animal loss but directly by the waste. In 1989 a school in Hudson County, New Jersey, was shut down. The students had suffered from excessive exposure to a chemical called chromium.

Symptoms

Chromium chemical symptoms can include: sinusitis, nasal septum perforation, allergic and irritant dermatitis, skin ulcers, respiratory irritation, bronchitis, asthma.

Here are definitions of the terms:

Sinusitis: inflammation of a sinus or the sinuses.
Nasal septum perforation: a hole in the vertical tissue that separates the nostrils.
Allergic and irritant dermatitis: inflammation of the skin.
Skin ulcers: a sore on the skin, with broken or unbroken skin
Respiratory irritation: breathing system reaction to adverse foreign stimuli
Bronchitis: acute or chronic inflammation of the membrane lining of the bronchial
tubes.
Asthma: constricting of the bronchial tubes characterized by sudden, recurring
attacks of difficult breathing, wheezing and coughing.

Common storage

All rules for hazardous waste in the United States are created and enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA.Sealed containers that are buried are the most common. The type of container depends upon the type of waste to be stored. All must have a lid that seals, free from leaks and have a clean outside surface.Some waste such as soil containing lead is allowed to remain buried under a sealing layer of hard clay. This is because it is not likely to migrate. Migrate refers to a substance that gets carried in runoff, evaporates or is otherwise moving from a fixed location.


Many cities in the United States have designated facilities that charge disposal fees. There may also be restrictions on when household waste of a hazardous nature may be collected.

Reference: http://www.ehow.com/about_5371377_effects-toxic-waste-environment.html

- Christian Andrew B. Galeria