Cardboard – often from raw material packaging as it arrives to AbbVie sites, the boxes they arrive in.
Waste Management in Manufacturing
Different Types of Wastes Streams
When you throw out your garbage and recycling at home, do you ever wonder what happens with it? You’ll throw it in the bin, and then it’s eventually picked up to sent to a recycling center or a landfill or some other location. The same applies in our manufacturing plants, except here our waste streams are significantly more complex than material to be recycled. Chemical manufacturing can produce many liquid and solid waste streams that need special handling and processing to be properly disposed of. Read on to learn more about waste streams within pharmaceutical manufacturing!
Solid Waste
AbbVie’s manufacturing capabilities range from chemical-based API manufacturing, to plastic molding, all the way to packaging. All of these types of manufacturing generate some type of solid waste. Here are some examples:
Hard Plastic – examples include trays product arrives in or left over plastic from injection molding.
Chemical Powder – examples include left over solid from reactions or filtrations.
Plastic Film – often from raw material packaging as it arrives to AbbVie sites, like powders arriving in bags.
Single Use Equipment – examples include chromatography skids used in biologics manufacturing.
Expired Materials – if a material expires, it needs to be disposed of properly and cannot be used.
Liquid Waste
AbbVie’s manufacturing processes can also create liquid waste that is either able to undergo additional processing to be re-used by municipalities or needs to be segregated and sent out in tankers for disposal. Here are some examples:
Water based, soluble organic waste streams often consist of water and a mix of dissolved chemicals or other solvents. These waste streams can be processed to remove the non-water components to enable the water to be re-used. We’ll learn more on the next page!
Some heavily solvent based waste streams cannot be recovered and often require offsite disposal due to hazards associated with the materials. Sometimes, these waste streams are incinerated as disposal!
Gaseous Waste
Many chemical based manufacturing processes will also create gaseous waste streams that needs to be captured to prevent them from entering the environment.
These gaseous waste streams are often called offgas and can range from carbon dioxide and steam, to organic solvents. Depending on the waste stream, it may be able to be off-gassed into the environment, like steam for example. Those that cannot have to be captured or incinerated.
How Do We Process Waste at AbbVie?
Now that we know some of the different types of waste streams, how do we know how to dispose of them? We’ll take a look at wastewater at AbbVie. The first step involves our Environment, Health, and Safety teams where they perform characteristic assessments of each stream to the environment and to employees.
Once the waste stream is assessed, the team can move forwards with handling and disposing of it properly. Some AbbVie sites have Wastewater Treatment Plants that process wastewater streams from manufacturing – check out below for more!
Industrial Wastewater Treatment Plants
Sites, like AbbVie’s North Chicago Manufacturing (NCM), leverage onsite wastewater treatment plants (WTP) that will help process liquid waste streams to breakdown residual organic solvents and chemicals, leaving behind water. The water from the NCM WTP is then discharged to the city’s Water Reclamation District to be further treated before being returned to local water supplies. Below, we’ll take a look at how the NCM WTP works!
First, the incoming waste streams are mixed and equalized. The pH is then adjusted to the desired operating range. This is important to ensure the rest of the treatment proceeds properly.
Next, the waste stream is sent to an aeration basin where bubbling air through the liquid and a large population of microorganisms in the basin break down and remove residual organic solvents.
From there, the treated waste stream has a mix of solid biomass and treated water. The mixture is sent to a clarifier where the solids settle to the bottom to be removed and filtered downstream or sent back upstream. The separated water in the clarifier is then discharged from the WTP to the local Water Reclamation District for further treatment.
Tank Farms
For liquid waste streams unable to be processed in a WTP, the volume will be consolidated in large collection vessels at a tank farm. The contents will then be loaded onto a tanker truck to be, likely, incinerated at a waste processing facility. Incineration isn’t just helpful for liquid waste streams though, as we’ll see below!
Thermal Oxidizers
One way to breakdown gaseous waste streams is with a thermal oxidizer. Many chemical production facilities will utilize these.
Think of these as extremely hot furnaces. There is a flame burning at over 1,400°F (760°C) that will oxidize and breakdown organic compounds, into water and carbon dioxide via combustion. This allows for harmful pollutants to be destroyed before entering the environment.
