New Green Ideas

Use absorbents wisely

Pigs, pads, pillows, and mats

• Keep these absorbent devices on-hand to prevent very large oil spills from spreading.
• After use, wring out the absorbed fluid into the proper drum for recycling or disposal, and reuse of the absorbents.
• Spent absorbent devices must be disposed of properly. This involves determining whether the spent absorbent is a hazardous waste. Floor sweep (grease sweep, “kitty litter,” absorbent pads, rice hull, etc.)
“These are expensive and very time consuming” -$-$-$ These absorbents should be used only when the spill can not be cleaned with proper equipment. The Spillpro pneumatic tool, which is a fluid cleanup and recovery machine is the best we have found. Shop, rags or dedicated mops with oil remediation products like Bio-Rem 2000 can also be used.
• Restrict the use of these absorbents to cleaning up gasoline,diesel, solvents, oil spills or other hazardous waste chemical spills.
• Use floor sweep until it no longer absorbs fluids. Recycle used floor sweep if possible, or dispose as hazardous waste. Floor sweep can be processed to reclaim and recycle absorbed compounds. Ask your vendor about recycling opportunities for spent floor sweep.

Keeping your shop clean and safe

When used together, the following practices and equipment significantly reduce the amount of water needed to clean shop floors. Minimizing waste water generation will reduce environmental liability and help your shop stay ahead of tightening regulations.

Prevent oil spills from ever reaching the floor.
• Stop if there’’s a drop! Never walk away from an oil spill. If oil spills are not cleaned up immediately: Workers can slip and fall. Oil, antifreeze, and other spilled material can mix and be tracked around your shop and into vehicles. You will spend more time and money washing the floor.
• Mechanics should carry rags so that small spills can be wiped dry when they occur.

In case a medium-sized or larger oil spill or other type spill occurs, cleanup equipment should be well marked. For example, attach red flags to Spill recovery equipment, such as pneumatic tools specific for cleanup and containment of spills, mop buckets with remediation products used for spill cleanup so they can be easily located by workers. Keep all spills out of sewer drains.
• Sweep your floor with a broom every day to prevent unnecessary dirt and contaminant buildup.
• Never hose down your work area! This practice generates large quantities of contaminated wash water that is discharged to a sewer, or worse, is flushed out of the shop to a storm drain.
• If you use a pressure washer to clean your floors, be sure to use a remediation product before you wash. Even if pressure washing is performed by a contractor, your shop is responsible for proper management of the wash water and can be held liable for its illegal disposal. The best way to avoid this liability and the costs associated with pressure washing is to clean up oil spills when and where they occur. A pneumatic vacuum helps to complete this task along with a microbe product to eliminate the small amount remaining. The oil one can recover with the vacuum can then be recycled.

In a perfect world, we would all practice careful precautions when dealing with large quantities of oil and mass-scale spills would never occur. In reality, however, mistakes do happen. Once a spill occurs, there are a number of potential courses of action. One of them, known as bioremediation, sets itself apart in terms of environmental friendliness and efficiency.

Bioremediation involves the use of various microorganisms and plant enzymes which break down soil contaminants and return the setting of the spill to its original splendor. This tactic bears the distinct advantage of treating the problem without the need for excavation and further disposal of contaminated water. If a spill is caught quickly and treated with bioremediation, the environmental dangers are kept to a minimum.

One use of bioremediation is the application of biological microbes for the clean up of hazardous oil spills or remaining film resulting in a safe, efficient and cost-effective solution. Bioremediation uses microbes, enzymes, oxygen and other nutrients to chemically transform oil into carbon dioxide and water. BioRem-2000 Surface Cleaner™ increases the surface area of the oil while the enzymes break down the contaminants into smaller molecules. The enzymes then attract the microbes and consume the oil leaving only water and carbon dioxide as by-products. Once the reaction is complete, the enzymes break free to attach to another hydrocarbon source in order to repeat the same reaction.

Bioremediation techniques are currently being used at hazardous waste sites. Specifically, they are applied to waste sites facilitating the clean up of biodegradable contaminants. The majority of environmental hazards in which Bioremediation has proved successful include those of oil spills, gasoline contaminations, chlorinated solvents and other toxic chemical leaks. Examples include the gasoline contamination in Galloway, New Jersey, the crude oil spill in Bemidji, Minnesota, the fuel leak in Hanahan, South Carolina, and the sewage effluent in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

GGS Team

We love to fish and have used lots of outboard motor oil over the years. Once, I had my Honda put down on the floor incorrectly for a month. When I set the outboard motor up, over a pint of oil poured down the side and onto the concrete patio. This was the first time I had a bioremediation solution with me for something like this event. I sprayed the microbe solution on the spill and outboard motor. The BioRem-2000 surface cleaner ate the oil up and zero stain remains. Impressive.

Anybody involved in this type of hobby knows, you will have oil on your hands or around your equipment at different times. We take the solution with us in a small spray bottle and it has been handy many times to clean our mess or hands in a complete and green way. Kudos!

Mopping: Fill the container with properly-diluted product. Unlike degreasers, this microbe solution digests oil and grease. As a result, there will not be an oily film in the water of the mop bucket. The following surprised me; Although the water may look dirty, it does not mean the solution has stopped working. Keep using the solution.

For best results, with oily floors or visible oil, allow the solution to remain on the surface for about 30 seconds before mopping. Liberally apply to floor with a wet mop, dip mop again into bucket and agitate solution into surface film. After several days or heavy use, you will see a film develop on the surface of the solution. This is evidence your bucket of product has lost its ability to digest oil and grease. EPA approved to dump down the drain and will in fact help promote cleaning through the drain system. Mix up a new batch when needed.

If the grease and oil is thick, use a deck brush to scrub the solution into the surface oil and further agitate the microbes before mopping. This process will remove the oily film and leave the surface dry and clean preventing slip-and-fall accidents.

BioRem-2000 treating a fuel spill at a railroad yard in the above video. This is a shallow spill, and calm spill until the microbe solution is added.

BioRem-2000 uses bioremediation technology with microbes and enzymes to biologically treat spilled hydrocarbons. The solution converts the hydrocarbon spill into water and carbon dioxide. This great green solution renders flammable hydrocarbons non-flammable within seconds. The hydrocarbon spill will be completely gone with proper agitation and the needed amount of BioRem-2000.

Living Microbes Are An Amazing BioRemediattion Solution

Living microbe Surface Cleaner

Features and Benefits

• Microbe Technology – Remediates a variety of hydrocarbons into water and carbon dioxide.

• Eliminates 100% of disposal costs.

• Eliminates granular absorbents, socks, pads and caustic chemicals with ground-breaking microbe technology.

• Easily applied with mops, auto floor scrubbers, spray-n-wipe and parts washers.

• Fast-acting, dries quickly and removes all oily, slick residues leaving a non-slip surface.

• USDA-approved (A-1, A-4) NSF Reg. #123558, biodegradable with a neutral pH.

• Safe to use on any water-safe surface, including metal, concrete, plastic and rubber.

• Disposable in waste sewer drains whether facilities are private or municipal pre-treatment plants.

• Renders flammable liquids, such as gasoline and JP8, non-flammable.

• Non-toxic, non-pathogenic and is completely harmless to human, plant, animal and marine life.

• Compatible with oil/water separators, skimming units, evaporators and more.

Bioremediation is a fairly new technique within the past ten years that has yielded both remarkable and yet some setback results. As to advantages, bioremediation is a “natural process”, it destroys the target chemicals, its’ usually less expensive than other technologies, and can be used where the problem is located. Disadvantages of bioremediation include the fact that little is still known concerning specifics on its effects in areas having multiple contaminations, it often takes longer than other treatment methods, and that it requires constant monitoring to ensure effectiveness.

Bioremediation has diverse effects on different sites of saturated soils. The most vital factors that control the effectiveness of bioremediation are the permeability of the soil and the biodegradability of the organic compound. The type of soil will determine its permeability. Fine-grained soils such as clays and silts have a lower permeability then coarse grain soils like sand and gravel. Bioremediation is cost competitive and requires 45-140 dollars per ton of soil to biodegrade (For certain types of bioremediation). This is exceedingly cheap and is a massive economic advantage so companies who just lost capital with a petroleum spill can afford for the site to be remediated. Bioremediation Techniques can be easily combined to make the clean up process more efficient.. This can lead to future research of bioremediation to see if it can be combined with other techniques and maybe even become a part of every day life.