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Getting rid of old coolant... suggestions?

SRT Mike

Stainless
Joined
Feb 20, 2007
Location
Boston MA
So I have accumulated four 55-gal drums of disgusting old coolant from my once-every-5-years cleaning of my coolant tanks. It's a mixture of coolant, tramp oil and all sort of other nasty stuff that forms in the tanks.

I had called Safety Clean and they wanted around $150 per barrel to take it away, which seems like a lot. Especially since I just moved and I will be filling a few more barrels this weekend.

Any (legal) tips/suggestions? I don't have an evaporator... are there places that evaporate it for you? What do you guys pay for removal per barrel of old machining coolant?

Just want the stuff out of my shop - for less than a grand.
 
You could likely wrap a barrel heater around the barrel to evap off the water, and then give the rest to a chumm that burns waste oil for heat.

I have a chumm that just leaves it set outside and slowly sepperate. Then on a cold Jan day, he will go out there and pump or pour off any oil that is on top, the rest will be mostly water. Not sure what he does with that? If he evaps it or just "knocks down the dust" in the driveway? 'cept he's mostly all concrete now... ???

He burns the oil in his furnaces..


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox
 
On our side of the pond getting rid of the stuff is easy. The price is about 20$ a barrel at our "hazardous waste company". However they'll charge around 100$ to pick the barrel up and return an empty one. You might save a lot if you can deliver it to your appropriate disposal facilities. Anyway, do the proper thing and you'll feel good. Burning the stuff in any old furnace might work but certainly wouldn't be legal, here at least.

Regards,
Harri
 
150 is a little high
probly because of new customer sample charges
i pay safety clean about 1.25 a gallon
besides ox's suggestion there are few other legal ways
just do it now before its 10 barrels
 
waste oil

there are companies that handle waste industrial oil. they deliver a 500 gallon pallet size plastic tote / tank. you pump your stuff in and they come with a truck to pump it out of the 500 gallon plastic tank.
.
if you hang on to the 500 gallon tote it is a way of accumulating it as they charge for every time they show up in addition to how many gallons they take away.
.
try the telephone book for places that sell lubrication oil, often they also have a service for taking waste oil away.
 
something i read.

hi,
one of the post's that i read may be your answer.
i haven't tried it but it sounds good.
take a small air pump with an airstone from aquarium. put the stone in the barrel with enough hose to get it down to the water. this should allow the water to evaporate in a few days.
 
Contact your coolant supplier, we did and the company they recommended bypassed the testing as we are one of the coolant supplier's users and they have already tested all of thier products. Pricing was $1/gallon if they suck it out on site and $2/gallon if they haul the drums off. The vac truck sucked 5.5 drums empty in about 10 minutes. We de-headed the drums and filled them with chips, sent the drum and chips off to recycling.

Steve
 
I've seen coolant dumped in parking lots, storm drains, even creek beds here in Georgia, more times than I care to remember. So, like wage and hour laws, in spite of federal regulations what you can get away with really varies by state. I'm guessing Boston isn't like Atlanta.

Last year I had an oil recycler pump out five drums full of contaminated oil. But coolant is mostly water and they won't take it. So the only ethical options are to evaporate out the water or pay to have the stuff pumped. At a buck-fifty a gallon for hauling I would invest into a drum heater.

Doug
 
How does a drum heater do anything except keep the water under the floating oil hot?

I'd get a centrifuge, or just wet down the parking lot...
 
There is a company around here that will pump out your tanks - they separate the oil and sell it to the asphalt manuacturers.

Will ask my boss who they are on monday. If you PM me during the day I'll get an email on my phone as a reminder.
 
Use a heater, along with a fountain pump. The pump is on the bottom, with the water.
Otherwise, there is just a cap of oil blocking all evaporation. If the pump output is allowed to splash onto a surface, the evaporation rate will go up dramatically.

I had a drum, open at top, painted black, and out all summer, and inside all winter. Always covered at night, and for any rain.
After a year, it barely evaporated a few gallons.

In a few days, I could evaporate 90 gallons of water with the heater, and fountain pump.
 
I had a drum, open at top, painted black, and out all summer, and inside all winter. Always covered at night, and for any rain. After a year, it barely evaporated a few gallons.

In a few days, I could evaporate 90 gallons of water with the heater, and fountain pump.

I was thinking of a tramp oil skimmer, but the fountain pump is certainly less expensive and probably more effective at promoting evaporation.

What happens when you get down to where there is more oil than water? Maybe some arrangement of a pump and skimmer would eliminate manual removal of the oil.

Doug
 
I worked a part-time night job for a guy who setup an open-top drum, barrel heater around it and a small aeration pump. The barrel heater was set hot, but just below boiling. A 20 to 30 gallon machine cleanout dumped into that barrel would be reduced to about 4-5 gallons of a primordial mix of coolant concentrate and tramp oils in about a week.

What I don't know is if our MA DEP (Dept of Environmental Protection) would have any issue with open evaporation of any VOC's (volatile organic compounds) that might be in the barrel before evaporation began. There was a Rube Goldberg fume hood exhausting to the rear of the building, I couldn't smell anything going on once I got more than 6 feet (2m) away from the barrel.

As long as it was just water evaporating, I think it's an ingenious way of reducing the amount of waste you have to pay for disposal. At least there won't be any EPA Superfund site in the parking lot.
 
I've been thinking about making a pan, Steel or Al, with edges raised about 2" all around, perhaps 2'x4', painting black and having that in the sun during summer, maybe a very slight slope to collect the thicker oil in another bucket, and slowly adding coolant to it at the top should allow it to evaporate pretty fast and no energy cost. thankfully I might only have to evaporate about 30gal. Finding a place to burn the oil ain't too hard :)
 
Just use caution when "giving" waste oil to a buddy with a waste oil furnace! I once worked at a place that got caught doing that and was cited for processing waste without a permit! Their statement was that the receipient had no way of knowing what was in the waste oil reservoirs....
Remember; while the government trims expenses, the EPA has to sustain their own payroll and fines are the only way to do it!
 
Remember; while the government trims expenses, the EPA has to sustain their own payroll and fines are the only way to do it!

Same goes for the traffic cops.... :rolleyes5:


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox
 
What, none of you guys load tha barrels on there sides in the back of your pickup, wait for a rainy day, and drive around with the valves cracked open? Heck, I gotta go for a drive....it's rainy here today. :D

There should be a waste collection agency that'll take it off you hands. A good search of the yellow pages or the web will find one.
 
Well, seeing some of the footage from what was floating after the floods and hurricanes, I'd say coolant is the last thing they have to worry about in this soup.
 
Keep your paper work in order if you off load it to some one else. AND! make sure they have proper papers for processing it. I'd ask for a copy of their Authorization Papers too. Don't forget to look at the date on the document.

I don't know if they do this now, but I'd like a document which tells me the load you gave them had been destroyed, so you don't have to worry about it anymore.

You are the creator of the "mess." Until it's destroyed you are still responsible for it.

There is no humor in this post.

Regards,

Stan-
 








 
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