Management strategy for hazardous waste from atomised SME: application to the printing industry

This paper develops a management strategy for the hazardous waste generated by an atomised sector, integrated by highly dispersed small enterprises, considering two of the actors involved: the waste producers and the intermediate waste manager. The strategy is applied and validated in a system where the producers are the Galician (NW Spain) printing plants belonging to a regional association, and represented by a reference plant. The intermediate waste manager is a local waste transfer station. The strategy considers the waste management hierarchy, settled by the European waste Directive, and the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) philosophy. Both elements are combined, and the IPPC philosophy is adapted to the small and medium sized enterprises. The original system, integrated by a printing plant and a waste transfer station, is analysed to detect the Improvable Flows. A series of alternatives, based on the waste management hierarchy and on Best Available Techniques, are proposed to improve the system, and some of them are selected for being implemented. After implementation, the improved system is compared with the original one, showing that, besides reducing the amount of waste managed in the system, a symbiotic relationship between both actors has been settled. In this work, principles established considering big installations have been adapted to sectors that, in spite of being mainly integrated by small and medium-sized enterprises, generate a not negligible amount of diverse hazardous wastes. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.