Albemarle Corporation, a chemical manufacturer in Tyrone, Blair County is an environment innovator. They won a Governor's Award for Waste Minimization in 1994 for recycling and reusing waste chemicals and were the first company in Pennsylvania to adopt an environmental management system to become ISO 14001 certified in 1996 and were recertified this year. So, what do you do for an encore?

How about use new technology to treat 3.4 million gallons of liquid waste, eliminating the hazardous part, removing 728 trucks from local roads and saving $800,000 a year in the process?

Albemarle Corporation, formerly Quality Chemicals, Inc., employs over 155 people in Tyrone and is one of the area's largest employers.

The plant generates about $50 million a year in sales of fine organic chemicals for the pharmaceutical, photographic, agricultural and general chemical industries.

"We constantly look for new technologies to make us more competitive," said Ivan Riggle, Site Compliance Manager for Safety, Environment and Quality Assurance at Albemarle. "Hydrocarbons in some of our aqueous waste streams were costing us a lot of money to truck for treatment as a hazardous waste. We knew we had to do something."

It cost Albemarle about $2,000 a truck to have the liquid hazardous waste hauled to New Jersey for treatment; on average about 725 trucks a year.

After some research, Riggle found a European technology from Akzo-Nobel -- a macro porous polymer extraction system -- that treated the aqueous waste to fix the hydrocarbons in a way that allowed them to be removed and incinerated leaving the remaining non-hazardous liquid. The liquid could then be safely discharged into the Tyrone wastewater treatment system for further treatment.

"Akzo-Nobel brought in a trailer mounted test unit for us to try," said Riggle. "We also brought in folks from DEP and Tyrone early with the pilot system to make sure we were doing everything properly, meeting all the requirements, and so they could see how it worked."

The final installation cost about $800,000 for the equipment and another $600,000 for a building to house the unit.

"From a sustainability point of view, all those trucks are not going through Tyrone and fuel is not being used to truck that waste," said Riggle. "Yes, we pay a higher sewer bill, but we don't have to pay to truck the waste out-of-state. Those dollars stay in our community and help the Tyrone system."

The system Albemarle installed paid for itself in less than 18 months.

In addition to these savings and the environmental improvement created by the project, Albemarle just this week won the 2005 Industrial Waste Excellence Award from the PA Water Environment Association for this project.

What's next?

"We're looking at other ways to apply similar technologies to treat other waste streams in our facility, including phenols," said Riggle. "Our focus has always got to be on finding new ways to keep our costs down."

"We think this is one way to be more competitive," said Riggle, "But it's also the right thing to do."

For more information contact Ivan Riggle at 814-684-7225 or send email to: Ivan_Riggle@Albemarle.com .

6/12/2005