Want To Know Where Your Hazardous Waste Is Going? Find Out!

4 November 2018
 Categories: Environmental, Blog

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If you hire a hazardous waste company, you want to be sure that the hazardous waste you want that company to pick up is not going to be disposed of or dropped in the middle of nowhere. How can you know for sure that your hazardous waste is not going into the ocean or stockpiled in an unsecured underground bunker? There are definitely ways to find out, and it involves much more than just asking the company representative!

​Ask!

A hazardous waste management company, under the law, must tell you how and where it disposes of the waste it collects. They cannot be vague or evasive; they have to tell you directly. If you are not understanding the process they are describing, get them to break it down further for you so that it is completely unmistakable about where your hazardous waste is going.

Research

In order to handle and manage hazardous waste, hazardous waste companies have to be registered with the government and licensed by the state. Because of these strict statutes governing their operation, there are also reporting bureaus that keep track of which hazardous waste management companies are in violation of federal and state environmental laws. These reporting bureaus are able to reveal to consumers which hazardous waste companies have had major issues reported in the past, and which ones presently have violations pending against them. Those hazardous waste companies that do not have any ill reports are the ones with which you want to do business.

Tour

Some hazardous waste companies offer tours of their facilities. You can visit the plants and tour some of the common areas. Plants that handle more dangerous materials, such as nuclear waste, are off-limits, but others for more common hazardous waste materials encourage visitors to come see what it is they do. This is a great opportunity to see how the waste is disposed, contained, or shipped to other plants that recycle the waste into useful products (e.g., batteries into steel, zinc, etc.).

​Choosing the Hazardous Waste Management Company

This is a very important step in the process. Do not simply hire a waste management company based on cost. Opting for cheap services and/or not doing your homework on the company is a recipe for environmental disasters. Those disasters are not something to which you want your company's name attached! You want to know and intelligently hire a hazardous waste management company that is very good at what they do, and worth every penny of the cost.

Contact a company, like Ohana Environmental Construction Inc, to get started.