One Company Is Getting the Lead Out : Pollution: An Anaheim manufacturer isn’t waiting to be told to clean up its act. It has invested in advanced technology to treat its waste water.

In the back of a nondescript, single-story industrial building here, crammed into a long, narrow area that looks as if it was once a loading dock, lies a baffling array of pipes, valves, holding tanks, and computerized control panels.

There’s not a lot of obvious activity: The valves hiss occasionally and water swirls in some of the open tanks, but the real action is hidden from view, visible only on the computer monitor in the tiny office that serves as a control center.

This large, intricate installation at Aeroscientific Corp., a printed circuit board manufacturer, is one of the most advanced waste-water treatment facilities anywhere, a system which could potentially enable a wide variety of companies involved in metalworking to virtually eliminate hazardous heavy metal waste byproducts while vastly reducing water consumption.

The $1.2-million system was designed by a small Canadian firm and installed more than a year ago with the help of a $100,000 grant from the state Department of Health Services alterative technologies program. And though the final report on the experimental system’s performance is not due for several months, Aeroscientific officials already consider it a success.

“This system will definitely meet our requirements for the next four or five years,” said Mark Kowalski, vice president of facilities at Aeroscientific, a subsidiary of Data Design Laboratories. “There has been a real revolution in this type of equipment, and a lot of companies are trying to duplicate what we have done.”

Waste-water treatment is a critical issue in the printed circuit board industry and other metal finishing operations because the processes use huge amounts of water, and when the water is discharged it is contaminated with heavy metals such as copper and lead. In a conventional treatment process, the metals are precipitated out and then put through a filter press, and the end product is a metal sludge that is considered a hazardous waste.

The sludge must be hauled to a special hazardous waste landfill, which is already costly and will become even more so when a federal ban on dumping any untreated hazardous materials goes into effect in May. Moreover, companies are forever responsible for their hazardous wastes and could be exposed to huge liability claims if a dump ever has to be cleaned up or if the hauling truck has an accident on the way.

And even after the metals are filtered out, the remaining water is flushed down the sewer. If enough of the metal has not been removed, the company could find itself in deep trouble: Circuit board maker Diceon Electronics Co. and its two top executives are now facing felony charges for allegedly disposing of waste water that was not adequately treated.

Aeroscientific saw an opportunity to avoid some of these problems when it was planning a major expansion of its facilities several years ago. “When we started buying new equipment, we looked at the environmental side and said, ‘What’s going to be required?’ ” said George Smith, environmental manager at the firm. “We wanted to conserve water, minimize the long-term liability associated with landfilling hazardous materials, and minimize the maintenance and upkeep costs.”

“Traditionally,” Smith added, “industries of this type have made no modifications until forced to by the regulatory agencies. We chose to address all the issues, and went on a search to find interested companies.”

The company they found, a small Toronto firm called Toxic Recovery Systems International (TRSI), had developed a process based on two proven technologies known as “ion exchange” and “electrowinning.” Kowalski had long been interested in the techniques, and TRSI was involved in a related research project with the State Department of Health Services.

“I was in need of a waste treatment system, and I saw this as an ideal opportunity to put us way ahead of everyone else and gain a competitive advantage,” Kowalski recalled.

The TRSI system was installed at cost as a demonstration system, and still cost 20% to 30% more than a traditional system. But it is cost-effective because of the reduction in disposal costs and the elimination of long-term liability, Kowalski said.

And it positions the company to cope with possible future restrictions on water use or increases in the price of water.

At the heart of the system is a process called ion exchange, which takes place in cylindrical steel tanks filled with a special type of resin. The unstable resin molecules attract the metal ions in the waste water as they give up some of their own ions, and then the metal-saturated resins are cleaned out with an acid solution.

The acidic, metal-laden solution then leaves the ion exchange column and goes to an electrowinning tank that contains a removable steel plate. An electric charge is put through the plate and the water, and the metal is drawn to the plate and forms a thin sheet across it. The plate is removed and the metal peeled off for recycling, and then the solution goes back through the ion exchange so that all remaining particles are removed.

The process is monitored at all times to assure the proper levels of reduction are being achieved, and contamination levels are measured before anything is flushed down the sewer to assure that no disposal violations are committed.

Ironically, the local sanitation district, which grants permits for water discharge into the sewers, has not been appreciative of Aeroscientific efforts, according to Smith and Kowalski. They claim the district is requiring every customer to cut discharges from current levels, and hasn’t taken into account the fact that Aero has already made huge reductions in the amount of waste water and the amount of metal in the water.

“They are imposing restrictions on me that go far beyond what they are requiring of anyone else in this industry,” Kowalski complains. Rather than granting incentives to reduce waste, he said, the regulators are actually punishing the company for taking pro-active measures.

Aeroscientific and its parent company are also struggling with large financial losses due to a downturn in the printed circuit board industry. And TRSI, for its part, is trying to raise venture capital to stay in business. Making an aggressive approach to waste reduction succeed, it seems, requires a lot more than just a good system.

Wastewater Treatment At Aeroscientific The wastewater treatment system at Aeroscientific recycle up to 90% of the water used in building printed circuit boards, and virtually eliminates the production of hazardous heavy metal sludge. The system requires that the waste streams be separated according to the type of metal they are carrying. The streams then go to a pre-treatment system before entering the process described in the diagram below. 1. Metal-laden water from plant. A metal-laden stream of water from the manufacturing process flows through an “ion exchange” column, where a special resin soaks up the dessolved metals. The treated water can be released or re-used. 2. Sulfuric acid stream. When the resin is saturated, an acid solution cleans out the resin in the ion exchange column. 3. The acid and metal solution flows into an “electrowinning” cell, where the metals are drawn out onto steel sheets for recycling. Water with a very high concentration of metal bypasses ion-exchange, and flows directly to electrowinning. 4. After electrowinning, the water passes back through ion exchange to remove any remaining dessolved metals. Source: Aeroscientific