Chemical - Case Study 3

Acumen transforms waste management in Chemical company, achieving best practice, lower costs and improved awareness

Acumen’s customer is a global specialist fine chemical manufacturer, who provides products to a variety of industries.

The company needed to vacate a redundant chemical plant that contained about 6,000 tonnes of semi-solid Phosphoric Acid Sludge.

They recognised that:

• traditional de-commissioning methods would be costly and time-consuming
• a conventional approach would have meant considerable tank man-entry hours. It would also call for 6,000 tonnes of lime to neutralise the sludge, producing 12,000 tonnes of waste for Landfill.
• the project appeared to be costly in terms of time, hazard and money

Acumen provided an innovative solution to meet all of our customer’s requirements:

• we employed Acumen’s pioneering remote, non-man entry system to re-suspend the sludge. By doing this we avoided the need for time consuming and costly internal scaffolding, and hand jetting. The benefits to our customer were a considerable reduction in man-entry hours and quicker material extraction
• this stage was followed by processing the extracted sludge. Acumen provided a purpose-designed and operated mobile treatment plant that recovered water and valuable product. We reduced the overall waste quantity, so both disposal and transport costs were significantly less
• Acumen’s on-site bespoke processing gave back 2,000 tonnes of clean Phosphoric Acid product for resale and ruled out a costly neutralisation process. As a consequence, only 4,000 tonnes of material was landfilled. This resulted in a significant reduction in Landfill Tax and disposal costs

Acumen Waste Services was able to reduce the customer’s clean up costs by providing a solution which halved their anticipated costs.

The solution was also environmentally superior by reducing landfill deposits. Acumen also ensured the recovery of valuable product.

Clear thinking . . . .