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News

Strategic Disposal Projects: Your Transportation and Disposal Partner for PCB Waste

Posted: 1/18/24

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Service Type(s): #Strategic Disposal Projects #Careers and Culture

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At Heritage Environmental Services, we believe the best way to ensure safety, sustainability, and customer satisfaction with our transportation is to have it all under one roof. Our Strategic Disposal Projects Team was created to service a specific sector of the hazardous waste industry – shipping remediation waste solids. “We’re not reliant on others to perform work for us. Doing it ourselves helps us provide better customer service,” said Dan Handschu, Vice President of the Strategic Projects Group. “We can stand in front of our customers and say we can be in a place at a set time, haul X amount of material and bring X amount of trucks.”

What Are PCBs?

The Strategic Projects Team mostly works on sites contaminated with PCBs, which are polychlorinated biphenyls. PCBs are toxic man-made chemicals that were primarily used in industrial and commercial applications – anything from oil-based paint and motor oil to plastics and electrical equipment – from the late 1920s to when they were banned in the 1970s.

Safe Handling and Disposal of PCBs

Our team partners with contractors who are cleaning up these old commercial and industrial sites to offer safe, efficient, and sustainable transportation of this waste. Once it leaves the site, we securely transport it to either our RCRA Subtitle C landfill which is specially designed to safely contain hazardous materials, PCB remediation waste and LDR (Land Disposal Restrictions) compliant hazardous waste are sent to the landfill, while organic contaminants like gases, oils, solvents, or soils are sent to our incinerator.

Having received the CSX Chemical Safety Excellence Award for the last four years in a row, Heritage is proud to maintain an exemplary shipping reputation – backed by safety and sustainability. Our intermodal container method mainly utilizes truck chassis to service the customer site and haul to a transload location to load rail cars, which means the material is packaged and kept enclosed from the project site to the final treatment or disposal site. This method provides secure transportation and eliminates the risk of fugitive dust emissions compared to loading and unloading gondola railcars.

The logistics of shipping any waste can be challenging, especially when you factor in sustainability. Our truck to rail intermodal transportation modal typically offers a 75% reduction in GHG emission compared to trucking – which is why, when the Strategic Disposal Projects Group was established, it expanded our transportation fleet to include more than 120 rail cars and more than 800 intermodal containers. We operate five intermodal rail transload facilities, two in Indiana, and one each in Illinois, Staten Island, and New Hampshire, with an additional partner facility in Ohio. Since November 2005, we’ve shipped over 2 million tons, 70% of which has been by rail. In 2022 alone, we transported materials over 670,000 miles by rail.

In addition to reduced emissions, intermodal transport also provides better working conditions for our transportation employees by reducing the need for long-haul trucking. “We have drivers that can be placed locally and who make a few trips between the railhead and their destination daily,” Handschu said. “They can get to sleep in their own beds at night.”

Learn more about our Strategic Projects team here: https://www.heritage-enviro.com/services/strategic-disposal-projects/

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