You are here:
Tracking Chemicals in Waste Streams: An Approach Towards Resilience at End-of-Use Scenarios
Citation:
Hernandez-Betancur, J. AND Gerardo J. Ruiz-Mercado. Tracking Chemicals in Waste Streams: An Approach Towards Resilience at End-of-Use Scenarios. Enterprise and Infrastructure Resilience Workshop, Cincinnati, OH, August 12 - 13, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Understanding and tracking the performance of chemicals through their end-of-use stages is an important task to determine if these represent an unreasonable risk, to either human health and environment. In addition, it is crucial to acknowledge the vulnerability of chemical end-of-use facilities, and the possible effects on the surrounding communities and ecosystems, if an unexpected event occurs, and thus increasing potential chemical risk and exposure. This work aims to determine the geographical location of chemical end-of-use facilities and provide insights into the vulnerability and resilience of these facilities by using a data engineering approach for tracking chemicals in waste streams from the industrial generation source to the final waste handler. This work may be useful to inform EPA stakeholders, local government and communities to perceive in advance about critical locations where there is a high probability to occur unforeseen weather events and where these chemical end-of-use facilities are located.
Description:
Understanding and tracking the performance of chemicals through their composed life cycle is an important task to determine if these represent an unreasonable risk to human health and the environment. This task is important during end-of-use stages, where uncertainty is high due to different possible scenarios and less data reliability. Hence, tracking a chemical in a waste stream may help to determine not only an existing risk, but also the vulnerability and resilience of an end-of-use scenario, and therefore the possible effects on the surrounding communities and ecosystems, if a catastrophic event occurs. Thus, this work aims at proposing a data engineering and data reconciliation approach to track chemicals in waste streams, which may help to determine the geographical position of a facility in the U.S. and territories, which receives a chemical for further management (disposal, treatment, recycling, and energy recovery). The quantity of a chemical received and the spatial location of a facility may give insight into the vulnerability and resilience of the facility. Different U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) databases are used to retrieve information for tracking chemicals and location of facilities where an end-of-use activity has taken place.