Monthly Archives: March 2022

How to Prepare Hazardous Waste for Transportation

Industrial plants and businesses across the nation constantly produce hazardous waste. We’ve covered the four basic forms of hazardous waste; but in a nutshell, it’s defined as any substance or material that could have adverse health effects on those that come into contact with it.

Obviously, no facility manager is willing to put their employees at risk and are eager to transport waste off of their property as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this goes far beyond bagging it up and tossing it in the trash.

Let’s examine how a facility must stay in compliance with the law while prepping its waste for professional transportation and disposal.

Preparing Your Waste For Transportation

If your facility is ready to dispose of or move hazardous waste from its property, there are several preparatory steps to take into consideration. Your facility must strictly follow federal compliances in place or face charges that result in fines that could be more than $50,000.

Before you move hazardous waste off of your property, take the following preparatory steps as a starting point for avoiding any compliance issues resulting from your actions.

Ensure Your Transport is HM Registered

Any company or persons that offer hazardous waste transportation services must be registered to actually move hazardous materials. Before accepting any help from an entity, make sure that their registration is up-to-date (renewal is required annually) and that they have the capability to obtain a Hazardous Materials Safety Permit before the date you need transportation.

There are some exceptions to registration that include:

• Employees of an agency of the Federal Government
• State agencies and employees
• Agencies or a political subdivision of a state
• Hazmat employees

Anyone outside of those exceptions requires you to ensure registration in order to remain compliant with federal laws.

Create a Manifest for Your Waste Shipment

Moving hazardous waste means that you’ll need to leave a track record to your facility if something goes wrong in the process. Any hazardous waste shipment requires a manifest that documents information about the waste being transported and helps hold all parties involved accountable.

The Uniform Waste Management form from the Environmental Protection Agency allows for precise documentation of:

• The facility that generated the waste
• The type of waste being transported
• Who is receiving the waste

Ensure All Waste is Classified and Properly Marked

In order for any transportation company to move forward with your needs, your waste needs to be properly classified and labeled prior to shipment.

The most essential markings you’ll need to include in your labels are:

• The shipping name of the hazardous material
• The identification number of the hazardous material (per package)
• Markings must be in English
• Hazardous materials markings must be on display over a contrasting color background
• Marking labels must be unobscured
• Must be separate from any other markings on the package that could deter from the importance of a hazardous materials label

Check That Your Storage is Authorized for Transportation

Waiting on transportation as well as the actual transportation process requires proper storage that is dependent on the type of materials being transported.

From cans to tanks, and bulk cars, there are several options that your facility must choose from when safely storing and transporting hazardous materials. 

We recommend speaking with your chosen transportation company well in advance in order to guarantee the storage solutions you invest in are authorized for safe transportation.

Dispose and Move Your Waste Safely With TAS Environmental Services

If you need help disposing or moving hazardous waste from your commercial property, the team at TAS Environmental Services is ready to be of service.

We are dedicated to promoting safe hazardous waste practices and have the experience and licenses to help you keep your brand’s hands clean during the transportation process.

Reach out to us today to get your transportation and preparation questions answered. We’re ready to be your partner through all of your cleanup and transportation needs.

Keep Your Business Healthier With Integrated Services From TAS

Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response in Dallas-Fort Worth

The safety of a business is integral to keeping employees healthy and a workforce effectively in place. When a hazardous health threat makes its way into a business setting, it’s never a good sign for your brand if you don’t have a preparedness plan in place.

TAS Environmental Services offers environmental solutions to our clients that help protect their employees from hazardous incidents that occur inside the work, and external health hazards that could set back productivity.

What Do Our Services Protect Your Site From?

We specialize in protecting employees of industrial facilities from exposure to hazardous and toxic chemicals or materials.

While our main focus is still on customized in-plant preparedness solutions, we’ve expanded our services to include efforts that minimize the impact of COVID-19 throughout workplaces of all sizes.

Our Emergency Response Services

TAS is available to help our clients 24/7, 365 days a year. We take pride in our experience with emergency response in the workplace and know that our integrated solutions can help facilities that are concerned about industrial operations risks, as well as exposure to external illnesses like COVID-19.

Trust our emergency response services to be swift, efficient, and have your facility functioning normally as soon as possible.

Decontamination Services

Dangerous spills and exposure to hazardous elements can easily happen in the workplace, and TAS is dedicated to providing the appropriate resources to contain, clean, and help a worksite recover from an incident.

Our decontamination services include:

• Hazardous waste collection 
• Hazardous waste transportation
• Disinfection of impacted areas

Waste Management and Disposal

After we’ve cleaned up a spill and thoroughly decontaminated an area, we put our waste management and disposal skills to work.

Our personnel have decades of experience with safe waste management and disposal. We operate in complete compliance with CDC and WHO guidelines and guarantee total and ethical disposal of hazardous waste at your site.

Maintain Status Quo With On-Site Medical Monitoring

Keeping your employees healthy has never been more important, and with TAS as your partner against exposure to outside illnesses, you can easily prevent the spread of sickness throughout your workforce.

When you schedule on-site medical monitoring with our team our screening guarantees improved workplace safety. Our health-checks help identify potential infectious threats from visitors and employees before they enter your facility.

Regardless of your company’s specific protocols at this time, TAS is committed to providing unique monitoring solutions that mitigate the spread of any contagious illness as much as possible.

TAS Helps You Reopen After a Contamination Event

If your contamination event was unfortunately large enough to shut your business down for a certain period of time, we can help you safely reopen your doors to customers and employees.

Not only will we perform remediation & decontamination services, but we can also create an updated response plan for your team that can help reduce the likelihood of a future shutdown.

Let us help decontaminate your workspace and bring you the peace of mind you deserve as you bring your business back to full operations.

Start the New Year Prepared With TAS Environmental Services on Your Side

If you are a business owner that is concerned with the health and wellbeing of your employees but doesn’t know where to start the preparedness process, TAS Environmental Services can help.

Whether your business is a small startup or a large chemical plant, we can help you craft a preparedness plan that keeps your operations running smoothly should an unexpected event occur. 

Contact us today to learn more about our services in your area or to schedule your on-site walk-through with a member of our team.

We’re ready to help you keep your workspace healthier in 2022.

How Can TAS Environmental Improve Your Semiconductor Plant?

How to Improve Your Semiconductor Plant

Semiconductor manufacturing plants may create essential products for consumer use, but the truth is that these locations can be a hazardous environment for employees to work in.

Without proper training and plant management, workers can easily be exposed to toxic materials that lead to health hazards like cancer and birth defects.

TAS Environmental Services is dedicated to helping semiconductor plants in our jurisdictions remain safer environments for employees and the surrounding communities.

Here’s a closer look at why your facility should become a partner with TAS in the new year.

TAS Provides Turnkey Solutions Within a Wide Location Radius

We know that your semiconductor manufacturing facility doesn’t just serve one area. That’s why we’ve dedicated our turnkey and emergency response services to a 200-mile radius from our numerous facility locations.

We proudly serve key cities in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Reach out to us today to learn more about our services in your area and how we can help improve the peace of mind surrounding your facility.

Our Outsourced Solutions Keep Daily Operations Productive

Your facility can’t afford to lose productivity due to on-site accidents, unsafe practices, or disruptive spills. Trust TAS Environmental Services to have your outsourcing needs covered from the inside out.

Waste Management

Semiconductor facilities often deal with toxic materials like arsine and phosphine. Dealing with this type of waste requires safety and, above all, experience.

TAS Environmental offers waste management, processing and scheduling services that remove waste from your property safely and without threats to your surrounding environment.

When you work with us, you’re guaranteed:

• Adherence to all regulatory requirements surrounding toxic waste management
• Record keeping and manifests of anything we process or dispose of
• The management of all waste streams from your facility, and more!

Maintenance and Inspections

Maintenance and regular inspections are key to providing a safer work environment for your team. We understand that you have a schedule to keep and may not have the time to schedule and perform these necessities as often as you should.

TAS Environmental helps take the weight off of your facility’s shoulders and provides services that include:

• Daily site inspections
• Swift corrective actions
• Weekly inspections of equipment, safety stations, security systems
• Maintenance of your facility’s PPE inventory

On-Site Safety Training

While we provide an invaluable service to our clients, it’s also important that your team members also understand the ins and outs of on-site safety.

We proudly offer on-site safety training and assistance with your team meeting competency requirements.

Some of the training programs our experts offer include:

• OSHA training
• DOT Hazmat training
• RCRA training
• HAZWOPR training
• Client contractor safety training
• Sample handling and collection training
• Confined space entry training

Keep Your Semiconductor Plant Safer in the New Year With TAS Environmental Services

If you are a manager of a semiconductor plant and know that it’s time to start practicing safer daily operations, let the experts at TAS Environmental Services help. We provide customized solutions that meet the unique needs of facilities of all sizes.

From safety training to emergency response in the event of a tragic spill, our environmental services team is prepared to help you keep your community cleaner. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how to become a member of the TAS team!

How Do Environmental Services Address Different Types of Oil Spills?

Between 2010 and 2019, there were a total of 1.8 major oil spills each year that each released more than 700 metric tons of crude oil into the environment.

Although the number of oil spills has drastically reduced over the last few decades, even a more “minor” oil spill can cause substantial damage to the surrounding environment. 

Once an environmental control team gets the call to assess a spill, there are several potential approaches to cleaning up an area and protecting the environment from crude oil. However, the differences between offshore and onshore cleanup efforts are vast. 

Let’s dive deeper into the different cleanup approaches for the two types of oil spills and how cleanup services from TAS Environmental Services can mitigate local spill damages.

Onshore Oil Spill Cleanup Efforts

The first step in clearing out an onshore oil spill is general containment. Our team will initially place land booms that serve as a protective barrier that prevents oil from spilling beyond the surrounding area.

Responders then focus on soaking up the large puddles of oil with highly absorbent hydrocarbon pads. These pads are extremely useful because each package of pads can absorb between 18 and 31 gallons of oil. From there, they are easily disposed of in sealed plastic bags.

The final step in resolving an onshore oil spill is spreading floor sweep absorbent throughout the remaining affected on-land areas. This process can even include clearing out oil from soil that was impacted by a spill.

Floor sweep absorbent is a powerful cleanup material because it’s an easily spread powder that contains absorbing microbes that activate when they come in contact with oil. Once contact occurs, the absorbent rapidly turns liquids involved in a spill into a more solid mass that trained teams can easily collect and dispose of.

While we’ve just condensed a massive undertaking into one section of our blog, the truth is that a mainland oil spill can take around 4 months for a trained crew to clear out.

Offshore Oil Spills

Unlike mainland spills, off-shore spill cleanups have to contend with unpredictable wind and wave patterns that can easily spread a spill to disastrous proportions. To put it simply, even a minor spill can take upwards of 15 years for a crew to clean up. 

However, a team like TAS Environmental Services is dedicated to its cause and will implement the most appropriate strategies to protect as much marine and coastal life as possible. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to an offshore spill, it can be difficult to implement a solution that keeps every aspect of the environment safe. Let’s take a look at some of the top ways a professional cleanup team would address an offshore spill.

Containment Booms and Sorbents

Divers disperse and set up containment booms that cut off oil spills in specific areas. While oil booms in the water are useful for minor spills, the larger the ocean spill the more difficult it is to contain the issue.

Environmentalists will then attempt to soak up the oil through sorbents. These sponge-like tools are used to soak up oil in the ocean and can hold up to 90 times their weight. Using sorbents is best when thick crude oil is involved.

Skimmers

If soaking is an ineffective process, teams can deploy skimmers that essentially vacuum the water from the surface and separate the oil from the water. Although this process can be successful, if debris is sucked into a skimmer it can easily clog up and be rendered useless.

In-Situ Burning

In extreme circumstances like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in-situ burning has been used to literally burn off the oil from the surface of the infected water. Although this process does remove about 98 percent of the spilled oil quickly, it can still result in long-term impacts to below-ground vegetation in the affected area.

TAS Environmental Services is Prepared to Handle Any On or Off-Land Oil Emergencies

It’s clear that any oil spill is a serious situation that requires immediate response from an experienced, professional, environmental service team. At TAS Environmental Services, our spill support teams are on-call 24/7 and prepared to help you keep your community and the environment contaminant-free.

If your Texas company suffers a mishap that results in a dangerous oil spill, never attempt to resolve the issue on your own. Contact us immediately for swift response and environmentally-focused cleanup solutions. 

Top Horrifying Facts About Untreated Oil Spills

The large oil spills that people have seen on the news in the past aren’t a common occurrence. However, minor spills that leave less than 700 metric tons of oil can happen frequently and have a massive impact on the communities where they strike.

If your company is one that transports oil from location to location, keep these top facts about oil spills in mind as you focus on completing your deliveries as safely as possible.

One Spill can Cause Multiple Forms of Pollution

Many people wrongfully believe that an oil spill only affects the immediate area where it occurs. The truth is, it’s easy for oil to spread out, seep into the ground and have a negative impact on a community’s soil, water sources, and the safety of the food collected from these areas (i.e. produce and fish).

Oil spills also blast toxins into the air that can result in long-term respiratory damage for those unfortunate enough to inhale oil droplets or particles.

Local Economies can Plummet

Beaches, parks, and related recreational and commercial areas can all be shut down for a lengthy amount of time during a clean-up from an environmental services company. For seaside towns and other cities that rely on tourism for a thriving economy, an oil spill can quickly bring a halt to daily business and drain the prosperity from a community.

Animal Injury and Death

One of the most glaring threats of an oil spill is the death toll that animals experience in the aftermath.

When an oil spill occurs, animals exposed to the spill could end up with both internal and external consequences. 

One of the biggest examples of how oil impacts the wildlife can be seen in water-dwelling birds like ducks. Oil exposure misaligns bird’s feathers and leaves these species vulnerable to drowning because their coat is no longer waterproof or able to keep them buoyant. 

Aside from some of the obvious threats to animals, oil spills can ruin natural habitats and disrupt annual migration patterns leaving animals vulnerable to starvation and other threats.

When an oil spill disrupts the natural life cycle of wildlife, animals prematurely die out and the food chain in the surrounding environment could be negatively impacted decades after the clean-up. 

As an example, even if the smallest group of animals on the food chain were exposed to an oil spill, as they are eaten and the food chain moves up, more and more animals that were never even involved in the oil spill could begin to show signs of abnormalities and devastating health problems. 

Oil Spills Are a Volunteer Health Risk

When an oil spill occurs many people like to volunteer themselves as a community clean-up crew. Although this is a noble cause, the truth is that unless they are part of an experienced organization that regularly handles hazardous clean-ups, a person’s volunteer services are a hazard to their health.

Not only does oil create a respiratory threat, but the benzene in its makeup is a cancer-causing substance. Therefore, if an oil spill does occur within your facility’s community or on one of your truck’s routes, make sure that a professionally trained response company like TAS Environmental Services is on-hand to help with safe and effective clean-up duties.

Stop the Threat of a Community Oil Spill With TAS Environmental Services

TAS Environmental Services specializes in being one of the first teams to respond when an oil spill occurs both on and off land. We help ensure that any oil spill is quickly contained, cleaned up, and that the surrounding environment remains as clean as possible. 

Our emergency response team is available 24/7 to help communities that experience roadside spills and other environmental hazards. Contact us today to learn more about our services and to get your oil facility or plant associated with our helpful, knowledgeable, and efficient team.