A Practical Tool for Source Reduction in Electroplating Plants

Waste water, spent solvents, and spent process solutions are the major waste streams generated in large volumes daily in electroplating plants. These waste streams must be sigdicantly reduced to prevent pollution and reduce end-of-pipe treatment cost. In this endeavor, a computer-aided tool, WMEP-ADVISOR, is developed for source reduction by resorting to artificial intelligence techniques. This tool is capable of performing detailed process analysis on waste generation mechanism, identifling source reduction opportunities, and providing adequate decision support. The tool can be used for either on-site WM or off-line personnel training. Waste minimization (WM) in the metal finishing industry has drawn a great attention for a decade. It can be realized through source reduction, recyclingheuse, and source wastes treatment. Among them, source reduction has the highest priority since it aims at “ k i n g wastes in the first place; thereby drastically reducing the cost for recycling and waste treatment. While a variety of source reduction strategies have been developed, they have not l l l y permeated the industry (Melzer et al., 1990; Noyes, 1993; Duke, 1994). One of the major reasons is that they have not been well classified and compared in terms of cost, efficiency, and restriction. Moreover, the implementation of the source reduction strategies requires a large amount of experience. This experience is usually heuristic, problem specific, and locally available. Apparently, to achieve WM goals in the entire industry, it is highly desirable that a computer-aided tool be developed to help the plants of any size fight wastes. Huang et al. (1991) developed a computer-aided tool, namely MIN-CYANIDE, to assist engineers to reduce waste solutions in electroplating plants. Although it was capable of providing decision support to the “ i z a t i o n of only cyanide-containing waste streams, it has evidently shown that the expert system technique is an very attractive approach to solve environmental problems at an expert level. In this paper, a PC-based source reduction decision support system is developed by resorting to hzzy logic and expert system techniques. This system is capable of performing detailed process analysis on waste generation mechanism, identdjing WM bottlenecks, and prioritizing source reduction strategies in terms of technical feasibility, WM efficiency and cost. PROCESS WASTE SOURCE An electroplating process involves the application of thin metal coating of one metal on Author to whom all correspondence should be addressed. *