Minimisation of residues: the reduction in origin.

Recently the LATIN AMERICAN CONGRESS OF CHEMISTRY has been celebrated in Cuzco. The Congress structured in diverse Sessions and Work groups that tried on: enterprise social responsibility; the challenges and opportunities for the atmospheric environment; the biogeochemical cycles; compatible technologies with the ecosustainable; Bioremediation processes; environmental education and problems.

Also Round Tables of discussion on environmental management, environmental disasters were organized, sustainable development and power resources.

Altogether, they were more than 700 scientists and students those that participated in the event. One of the main conclusions generated in the Congress in relation to the management of industrial residues has been: the necessity to adopt measures organizativas and operative to reduce, until levels economic and technically feasible, the generated amount of by-products, residues and polluting emissions that need a treatment before their final disposition.

The organizers of the congress invited Professor Antonio Gil, of the Public University of Navarre, to distribute a conference within the thematic area “Chemical Industrialist and Chemical Engineering”. The set out work had like object the “Management of Industrial Residues” in which it appeared like example of implantation of clean technologies at industrial level, the processes of recycling of alumnio and of treatment of the saline dregs that carries out IDALSA.

“In particular, IDALSA has incorporated the technology of oxicombustión of high effectiveness in the burners of the smelting furnaces by the increase of speed of fusion, superior to 40%; by the reduction of the power consumption, between the 35 and 50%; the reduction of emissions, less N2, in flame; the pre-cure of aluminum dregs to reduce the required flux salts; the productive use of specialized furnaces of last technology in recycle scrap irons and by-products of aluminum using a minimum amount of flux salts and the use of new mixtures of salts to reduce the rate of residues on kilogram of obtained aluminum and, therefore the toxicity of the depleted fraction.”

In relation to the recovery and valuation of saline dregs, remainder that is generated in the aluminum recycling, the “Argonne National Laboratory”, next to the Department of Energy of the United States indicates: “between the different contemplated possibilities it seems that to reclaim only aluminum and to take to security deposits the contaminated salts and oxides nonrecoverable benefit is the nearest the positive balance of the analysis cost/, as long as the aluminum contents of it salts are superiors to 5%”.This same conclusion Professor Gil reached, affirming that “the valuation of these new residues is not economically viable, being the best option to diminish his production, to reclaim the fraction of aluminum metal and to deposit in controlled garbage dump the remaining fraction”. For Professor Gil “to day of today, a real market for the fraction denominated like NMP, products does not exist nonmetalists”.