What’s Going On? Water Scarcity, Tariff Hopes and Controversial Cleanup at Bhopal

Editor’s note: Welcome to What’s Going On? This is a quick look at news impacting the chemical industry from the lens of outside sources, including our parent company Endeavor Business Media’s many brands.

WasteWater Digest’s Editorial Director, Bob Crossen, reported from the WateReuse Symposium in Tampa. One of the sessions addressed industrial water scarcity.

“Three years ago, we decided we were going to do industrial reuse because we knew that our water supply, even with four rivers, was going to be finite,” said Mike Hopkins, Georgia’s Newton County Water & Sewerage Authority executive director.

With that thought of finite resources in mind, the city developed a business case evaluation that looked at water security, cost savings, environmental compliance and social responsibility.
While some processing businesses might be fretting over the escalating trade war the U.S. has engaged in with Canada, Mexico and China, others may have reasons to be more hopeful, noted Control Editor-in-Chief Len Vermillion in the latest Control Amplified podcast.

On March 18, DW News put together a package on recent controversial cleanup efforts from the 1984 Bhopal disaster site, where a Union Carbide chemical plant explosion killed over 25,000 people. Forty years later, there are still ramifications for local residents. Indeed, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department began incinerating the waste, which will then be buried in landfills. The whole process is expected to take six months and create hundreds of tons of toxic residue. It also creates fear of toxic exposure among the people living near the incineration site and the landfills.

DW News interviewed Fiona Macleod Erskine, chemical engineer, professor of process safety at the University of Sheffield and former guest on Chemical Processing’s Process Safety with Trish & Traci podcast.

When asked if it is safe to dispose of the waste from Bhopal by incineration, Macleod pointed out that the waste predates the 1984 accident. It was produced during the site's operation as a pesticide factory between 1969 and 1984. Some of the waste was packaged and stored above ground, but most of it is buried underground.

“In order to decide if incineration is an acceptable solution for the packaged waste, it’s key to understand the hazard — what can hurt us; the controls — how we protect ourselves; and the residual risk and decide if that represents a tolerable societal risk.

“I don’t know the exact composition of the 337 tons of packaged waste. What I do know is that it likely contains pesticide residue (carbaryl and aldicarb) reactor residue (including gamma-hexachlorocyclohexane) plus soil excavated from known hazardous waste dumping grounds, which may contain heavy metals like mercury and chromium. Without knowing the exact composition of the waste and the capability of the incinerator system (temperature control, gas cleaning and destination of the solid ash), it’s impossible to calculate the residual risk and say whether it’s acceptable or not.”

Watch the entire story: