Managing Special Hazards

Scenario
You have just been hired as National Laboratory’s Environmental, Health, and Safety Manager. You were pleased to see that the previous manager had disposed of nearly all of the wastes stored in the hazardous waste facility but noticed that there was an adjacent shed with a sign that read “Do Not Enter – Authorized Personnel Only.” You also noticed that the door was cracked open and upon shining a light inside, you saw:
A cardboard box labeled “Asbestos (friable) – Insulation”
A large wooden box labeled “Portable Gauge, Cesium-137”
A 55-gallon drum labeled “Paint Chips – Pb”
As you moved away from the door, you saw two large containers on the grass on the side of the shed:
A 55-gallon drum labeled “PCB Transformers” (with obvious corrosion and oily liquid saturating the ground adjacent to the drum).
An old 20-gallon plastic container marked “Pesticides – ???? unknown” (with obvious spillage on the ground).
A day after taking photos of these five items and emailing them to your boss, you get a voicemail from your boss asking you to meet her and the lab director the following week to present a plan to identify and dispose of these items and any contaminated soil adjacent to the shed.
Your Task: To ultimately dispose of these five items, develop a plan for characterizing each material for disposal. What would you need to know about the physical, chemical, or radiological properties of the materials to have sufficient information to assess their characteristics and hazard level so that appropriate disposal methods by a licensed disposal facility or other disposal means can be determined, and how would you determine that information? What specific testing methods (chemical analysis, survey meters/instrumentation, monitoring devices, etc.), if any, are needed, and what would you test? Explore potential commercial vendors that can provide testing, analysis, or instrumentation in the above identification to prepare for disposal and provide appropriate citations and references for those resources.
Based on the outcome of your evaluation, what would the final disposal facility for each type of waste potentially be, i.e., is it a municipal landfill, a hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facility (TSDF), or what kind of a facility would it need to be?

Last Completed Projects