Colleagues,
I’m looking for advice on on-site storage facilities for 55-gallon drums of waste solvents.
At Yale, EHS collects waste solvents from labs and commingles them into 55 gallon drums. We need a new place to store these drums prior to shipment. Every year,
Yale ships about 700 55-gallon drums of waste solvents to commercial disposal facilities. (About a third are not flammable).
Facilities has proposed that we purchase a modular drum storage building for storing drums of flammable solvents. These are much less expensive than constructing
a permanent hazardous waste facility. Here’s what we are considering:
https://safespacebuildings.com/products/hazmat-storage/
This modular building can be purchased to meet H-1 occupancy building codes. They are conditioned, have blow-out panels and fire suppression, and have a reservoir
for secondary containment and fire flow containment.
Please let me know if you have any experience with these buildings--pros, cons, tips, etc. I’ve never seen one in person, so I am a little concerned. We asked
our vendor about these (they encounter them when serving other customers) and did tour a small version of this modular unit. This has made me concerned about the effects of wear-and-tear, and the awkwardness of waste handling.
This will be a RCRA less-than-90-day accumulation area, serving a large contiguous area of campus. Solvents are commingled in one location, and will be transported
by truck to this modular building. We will probably store some labpacks in the building as well.
One of my concerns is structural quality and durability. It takes decades for Yale to build new hazardous waste management space, so this building needs to last
20, maybe 30 years.
Operations will be exposed to the weather--rain, snow, wind, etc. We can avoid using it during a blizzard, but waste handlers, the fork lift, and the drums themselves
are exposed to the weather when the doors are open to move waste in and out of the building.
The drums will need to be palletized and manipulated with a fork lift. In the unit, the palletized drums will be stacked two high and eight deep. The fork lift
will also be necessary for moving the drums from our truck into the building, and moving the drums from the building to the commercial disposal service’ semi-trailer. Currently, we do not palletize any of our hazardous waste, and we don’t use a forklift.
There might be other concerns that I am unaware of. Or perhaps you’ve found that these concerns are less of a worry that I anticipate. If you have experience with
this, I would very much appreciate your observations and advice.
Pete
Peter A. Reinhardt (he/him/his)
Director, Office of Environmental Health & Safety
Yale University
135 College St., Suite 100
New Haven, CT 06510-2411
(203) 737-2123
peter.reinhardt**At_Symbol_Here**yale.edu
