From Tech Trends March 1995

Anaerobic Thermal Processor Completes Second PCB Remediation

In the December 1991 issue of Tech Trends we told you about the anaerobic thermal processor (ATP) that had removed polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from contaminated soils during cleanup activities at the Wide Beach Development site in Brant, New York. The ATP, which was evaluated at Wide Beach under EPA's Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation (SITE) program, has been the subject of a second successful SITE evaluation conducted on sediments and soils at the Outboard Marine Corporation (OMC) site in Waukegan, Illinois.

The ATP, which involves a physical separation process that thermally desorbs organics such as PCBs from soil, sediments and sludge, is also designed to treat wastes with a nominal hydrocarbon concentration of 10%. At both Wide Beach and OMC, the ATP unit removed PCBs in the contaminated soil to levels at and below the desired cleanup concentration levels of 2 parts per million (ppm). At Wide Beach, PCB concentrations were reduced from an average concentration of 28.2 ppm in the contaminated feed soil to an average concentration of 0.043 ppm in the treated soil. At the OMC site, PCB soil concentrations were reduced from an average of 9,761 ppm to 2 ppm. No volatile/semivolatile organic (VOC/SVOC) degradation products or leachable VOC/SVOCs were detected in the treated soil at Wide Beach; at OMC, leachable VOCs and SVOCs and metals were below Resource Conservation and Recovery Act toxicity characteristic standards. At OMC approximately 0.12 mg of PCBs per kilogram of PCBs fed to the ATP were discharged from the system's stack. The ATP system was developed by UMATAC Industrial Processes under the sponsorship of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA) and is licensed by SoilTech ATP Systems, Inc., a United States corporation.

For more information, call Paul dePercin at the EPA's Risk Reduction Engineering Laboratory at 513-569-7797. An Applications Analysis Report and a Technology Evaluation Report describing the SoilTech ATP SITE demonstrations will be available in the Spring of 1993.