An unanticipated but significant claiming to executing industrial repair and maintenance projects is that most anything you might use to clean, lubricate, or otherwise preserve your facility and equipment can be deemed a hazardous waste material if it'due south leftover in sufficient quantities.

Paint Waste is a good instance

While it's intuitive that bubbling cauldrons of leftover cleaners and solvents might crave hazardous waste management, leftover paint seems relatively beneficial. Later on-all, you simply did the child's bedroom with baby blue latex, and nobody reported y'all to Social Services for child endangerment.

Besides, you're probably storing the leftover latex downwardly in the basement, at-the-set up for when Junior inevitably gets in bear on with his inner-Picasso and crayons the bedroom walls. So, the issue of pigment recycling has been a moot point for you. Correct?

But alas, when Junior grows older and baby blue walls go hopelessly "not-cool" among the fourth-grade population, how will you get rid of that estranged latex?

For small quantities, the answer is refreshingly elementary. The EPA suggests that you expose the leftover latex to air, or mix it with shredded newspapers, causing it to dry to a solid, and and then simply throw it abroad in the household garbage. Only household is the keyword here.

To paraphrase the EPA, "households" are "single or multiple residences, hotels, motels, bunkhouses, ranger stations, crew quarters, campgrounds, picnic grounds, and day-apply recreation areas."

Your industrial widget manufactory conspicuously doesn't qualify.

And so what to do?

If you alive in one of nine places, things might be relatively easy. PaintCare is a nonprofit organization representing paint manufacturers. It operates collection programs that allow you to accept leftover pigment to a collection site for recycling (normally a designated paint retailer).

More pertinent to this word, PaintCare likewise offers a service to households that have 200 gallons or more than of leftover paint to dispose of. They will come and pick it up. And you lot can't beat the price. It's gratuitous. Check it out here.

Only earlier y'all get too excited, know that PaintCare but operates in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Commune of Columbia, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont. If you lot live in one of the other 42 states, things are a chip more complicated.

Hither's what y'all need to know:

Latex paints

Here's some irony for you? Latex paints aren't considered a hazardous waste, so they're typically unwelcome at hazardous waste TSDFs, making them arguably more hard to dispose of than their hazmat counterparts—unless you lot know the right people. That would exist us.

For you DIY zealots, the most common communication is to mix latex paint with kitty litter, allow it to solidify, and then merely treat it as trash. Simply obviously, if you tried that with a few hundred gallons of leftover latex, the local feline population might have to become without, as it were.

Besides, latex paints are easily recycled. Solids are extruded from the paint, melted, and pelletized for use equally colorants or additives in other recycled polymers. And then, there are companies eager to have your leftovers, just to make them into something new that they tin can sell.

Isn't capitalism grand? To find a latex recycler near you, take a look here.

Oil-based paints

You've undoubtedly heard the term "oil-based paint." It's really pigment particles suspended in oil. Its viscosity depends on solvents such as turpentine or white spirit; and varnish might be added to increase glossiness.

Relative to latex, oil-based paints dry to a smoother and glossier finish, with a harder enamel that's more resistant to scratches and fingerprints. Viewed juxtaposed, many casual observers opine that the oil-based paint simply looks meliorate than its latex counterpart.

Anything that works that well, you might call back, is probably illegal. And you lot're pretty close to correct.

Since the 1990s, the EPA has been focusing on "volatile organic compounds" (VOCs), which are institute in things like drinking glass cleaners, dishwasher and laundry detergents, fragrances, and other seemingly innocuous things.

VOCs such every bit mineral spirits, naphtha, lacquer thinners, and other stuff y'all wouldn't remember to swig are constituents of oil-based paints. And when wet oil-based paints dry, the VOCs vaporize, scurry up into the sky, and promptly begin depleting the ozone.

And past now y'all've undoubtedly heard the news about the ozone.

That'south why oil-based paints are nowadays relatively scarce, and/or only sold in small quantities (usually less than ane quart). It's as well why information technology behooves yous to treat any leftover oil-based pigment as a hazardous waste. (Consider yourself behooved.)

To find a TSDF user-friendly to your work-site that handles oil-based paint, click here to contact united states of america.

Industrial Paints

If you lot're doing aerospace, automotive, or electronics—not to mention, marine, medical, military, optical, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, or cloth applications—you're probably not repainting because you've lately fallen in love with pastels and just want to brighten up the place.

More than probable, y'all have a specific demand (e.1000. heat resistance, rust prevention, waterproofing, or burn down-retarding) that requires one or another kind of industrial pigment. Such paints are pigmented liquids or powders for protecting substrates such every bit asphalt, ceramic, fiberglass, and metal.

If you lot're using industrial paints, look at the leftover drums. If they say acrylic, epoxy, polyester, polyurethane, or polytetrafluoroethylene, then they keep visitor with a rouges' gallery of resins, solvents, additives, and pigments that are of acute occupational interest to EPA denizens.

Although any one of these chemical constituents mightn't be a listed hazardous waste per the EPA, information technology could all the same be considered a characteristic waste if it possesses ane or more noxious "characteristics" such as corrosivity, ignitability, reactivity, and/or toxicity.

The danger here is that information technology'south up to you lot to determine whether your leftover industrial paint is a characteristic hazardous waste: a requirement you lot must meet within a specified fourth dimension-frame so that the paint "characteristics" don't change over fourth dimension.

Besides, y'all can't make this determination if the paint has been inadvertently mixed with another waste material, which would establish an entirely new and different toxic tin can of worms requiring more-complicated chemical analyses.

Clearly—as in all things regarding chancy waste (in specific) and the EPA (in general): expert advice is crucial.

Get Adept Help

If your business organization, organization, or government agency has pigment waste yous need to take disposed of or recycled, Hazardous Waste matter Experts can help you. For a fast price quote phone call usa at 800-936-2311 or click here to request a quote via email.

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* The featured image used in this postal service is by Steven Depolo and can exist found on Flickr here.