Guys,
Its all well and good to be cautious, but remember, this plant has been producing 1000 tons a month of this scrap for god knows how long. It also has invested in the equipment to crush, bale and load the the barrels and is currently loading them into shipping containers for moving to a purchaser. Nobody is stockpiling a 1000 tons a month of barrels somewhere because they are loaded with poisons. (Could the current scrapyard have supplied the equipment to the plant?)
So a lot of the environmental issues have been looked at and it is known fully how to deal with them, at least at the plant that generates them. I'm sure that anyone who generates a million pounds per month of waste barrels gets lots of free scrutiny by the EPA!! And asked about disposal of wastes, etc.
Also, the mere fact that they are loading sea cans with the product implies that the issues have been dealt with. And I'm not just suggesting its dripping with hoary crap heading for China, where the laws are more lax. I've seen a Chinese gov't inspector in Alberta, Canada, reject a shipping container of insulated copper wire because a couple of cables in the bales were gel-filled phone cables. The key here is that once the product is put in a sea can, it generates demurrage charges if there are things wrong with the shipment. So the waste generator and the company handling the scrap shipments must already have all of this sorted out.
There are just a couple of things that don't add up to me:
1. Container deliveries and pickups that don't happen regularly and are the source of the original problem. This service is not likely performed by the scrap company, but a container moving service. Whats up?
2. Why is the original product moved in drums rather than larger bulk carrying tanks? A little work with a calculator suggests that a staggering number of drums are used every month, and most of the universe that handles those kinds of volumes has migrated to railway tank cars and the like eons ago.
Jon.
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