On-Site Recycling Eases Costly Headache : Santa Ana Firm Brings Toxic Waste Answer to Companies’ Doors : A CLOSER LOOK : Strategies

As an environmental control specialist for Lockheed Aeronautical Systems in Burbank, Terry Carberry spends plenty of time worrying about how to dispose of the half a million gallons of machine coolant from three manufacturing plants each year.

Classified by California’s 1976 Hazardous Waste Control Act as toxic waste that can only be dumped at a shrinking number of Class I landfills, the fluid was costing Lockheed about $500,000 a year to dispose of and replace.

Some of the coolant was hauled to dumps as far away as Montecito and Kettleman City. Even then, company officials worried about liability during transportation and about residual contamination years after disposal.

But Carberry thinks he has found an answer that poses a smaller administrative headache at a lower cleanup cost: Recycling on the premises by a Santa Ana-based company called Fluid Recycling Service.

“It’s a lot cheaper than disposal,” said Carberry, because Lockheed can reuse the coolant after it has been cleaned. He estimates that the new procedures will save Lockheed about $120,000 a year.

At a time when companies with toxic by-products on their hands are beset by soaring hauling costs and increasingly stringent disposal regulations, Fluid Recycling President James Howie touts his patented mobile recycling process as the logical, least expensive solution.

The recycling procedure eliminates insurance costs and the payments to the state’s toxic waste Superfund that must be made when toxic materials are transported over public roads.

As of Jan. 1, 1986, California law has demanded that certain toxic wastes be recycled whenever possible. Furthermore, federal legislation passed in 1984 mandates that dumping at Class I landfills--the most toxic sites--must cease by 1990.

‘The Best Option’

So on-site recycling became “the best option because it limits our liability,” Carberry said.

Fluid Recycling’s patented technique processes up to 600 gallons per hour, separating metal for reclaiming, oil for refining, and coolant for reuse in the machines.

Criterion Machine Works, a Costa Mesa tool-manufacturing firm, each month generates 400 gallons of coolant tainted by dirt, metal shreds and hydraulic oil from lathes, mills and grinders.

According to support service manager George Smith, haulers 15 years ago paid his company 15 cents a gallon to reclaim Criterion’s used oil. But the situation changed, largely because of the stringent toxic disposal rules, and by the time his firm contracted with Fluid Recycling in 1985, Criterion was paying haulers 50 cents a gallon to dispose of its used coolants. The switch to on-site recycling saved the company $200 a month, Smith said.

Disposing of toxic fluids now can cost as much as $2 a gallon, said Larry Fink, vice president of Disposal Control Services, a firm that hauls wastes for Orange County government operations.

John Scofield, senior vice president at International Technology, which manages a Class I site in the Imperial Valley, estimates that the cost of toxic fluid waste dumping has tripled within the last two years and said that more oils and coolants are going to recyclers instead.

Only 4 Mobile Recyclers

While a number of recyclers offer toxic-fluid processing at their plants, the state Department of Health Services lists only four mobile fluid recyclers in the state.

The growth potential for Fluid Recycling’s business was boosted in 1986 when certain petroleum products--including cutting lubricants and coolants--were listed in an amendment to California’s 1976 toxic waste law as “economically and technologically feasible to recycle” for recovery of petroleum components, said Mary Burns, a hazardous waste supervisor for Orange County’s Health Care Agency.

To encourage recycling, Burns said, the law established fines of up to $25,000 for failing to process recyclable fluids.

And the ban on most dumping at Class I landfills is forcing toxic fluid producers to start looking for alternatives, Burns said.

Recyclers are picking up a lot of the new business. In 1982-83, it was estimated that 75% of the waste from the county’s 5,000 firms that produce toxic wastes was trucked to Class I sites, while only 15% was recycled, Burns said. In 1986-87, 34% was recycled and only 28% was dumped, she said.

But it was the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, which requires that hazardous waste producers document that they have tried to reduce the volume and toxicity of their waste material, that “made a business such as ours possible,” Howie said.

Recycling Cost More

“Traditionally, the spent fluids were either dumped in a nearby vacant lot, flushed down the sewer or carried off for a few cents to a public dump site. . . . Recycling then cost more than disposal.”

Fluid Recycling’s average charge is 75 cents a gallon, Howie said, but its clients are able to cut other costs by reusing the fluids.

Howie’s firm originally was a small research division of Wynn’s International, a Fullerton-based manufacturer of automotive parts and engine additives. Howie resigned as president of another Wynn’s subsidiary, Wynn Oil Co., to buy Fluid Recycling in January, 1986.

When he took over Fluid Recycling, Howie traded the security of a chief executive’s job with a multinational operation--managing more than 400 employees in 13 markets worldwide and raking in annual sales of $50 million--to head an independent company with a staff of seven. But, he says, he has no regrets about the gamble.

“This is a developing, not a mature, industry,” said the Detroit-born Southern Illinois University marketing graduate who views his enterprise as one “that I can build to the size of Wynn Oil within five to six years.”

More Than 100 Clients

He anticipates that sales will exceed $1 million this year. His firm now has more than 100 clients, from Lockheed to smaller companies like Criterion. Howie’s company also collects royalties from Safety Kleen, a nationwide solvent recycler which has licensed Fluid Recycling’s technology for use in 15 markets in the northwestern United States.

“In 1987, sales were 55% over ‘86, and we expect ’88 to be 100% better than in ‘87,” Howie said.

Fluid Recycling now has 21 employees on its payroll, runs a fleet of five green-and-white recycling vans and has been gaining 10 clients a month since October, according to Howie.

Currently in the process of licensing a Canadian firm, the fledgling enterprise has also received inquiries from an Italian company about franchising its technique.

Fluid Recycling’s only Orange County rival is a one-truck recycling operation in Los Alamitos called Coolant Management Services, which sells units to companies that wanted to do their own on-site recycling. The firm went mobile two years ago.

“Some accounts are asking us to recycle for them with the idea that eventually they can do it themselves,” said Patrick Cunningham, president of Coolant Management. The company continues to sell the self-operating units.

The two other mobile recyclers serving California are Hydra Fyne in the City of Industry and Industrial Waste Processing in Lyman, Wyo.