As industry in the United States becomes more modernized, it has also generated more waste products. In the past, the standard method of dealing with these materials was to simply discard them. Originally that meant throwing it out the front door into the gutter. As the population became denser, and people recognized the dangers involved with this kind of behavior, garbage collection was initiated to remove both household and industrial wastes. Municipalities now inherited the responsibility for dealing with this garbage. They developed a range of strategies including simply hauling it out of site, burying it in a landfill, dumping in the ocean, or a convenient river or lake, or burning.
There have always been specific types of waste material, generally known as hazardous waste that was not well suited for these simple methods of disposal. Of course medical facilities are prolific producers of hazardous waste material, including particularly dangerous items such as needles, bio-hazardous, and other contagions that could spread disease. Industrial processing can produce undesired side effects such as materials that contain heavy metals, noxious fumes and poisons. Electronics has been infamous for producing waste materials that are high in lead content. Even the garment industry, and especially the leather industry may use chemicals that may contain mercury. Agricultural waste products are produced at a tremendous volume, and must be properly handled.
Specialized businesses have evolved with the specific goals of efficiently collecting and properly handling hazardous waste products. There is a significant amount of laws and directives legislating the proper means of doing this. In almost all cases, an excellent paper trail must be maintained to record every step of the production of these wastes through the eventual final disposal. Of course, one of the most important parameters that are noted is the amount of the material, usually noted as volume, or weight.
In those cases where the material is measured by weight, the proper type of industrial scale is used. If there were fairly small amounts of material, a lab scale or a bench scale would be the proper choice. If the material is stored in cylinders, industrial cylinder scales will be effective. Larger amounts of hazardous material could be more easily weighed on platform scales or large floor scales. Those materials that are collected in drums can be loaded onto a drum scale for weight determination.
All of these different types of digital scales share a number of important characteristics. Due to the fact that hazardous wastes are often stored in unwieldy containers, the scales may experience shock loads as these containers are maneuvered or dropped on the scale platform. The larger scales may be loaded by forklifts or other automated devices, also risking harsh loads on the industrial scale platform. While many scales are manufactured with load cells made from aluminum, the better quality digital scales, including those offered by Arlyn Scales, utilize stainless steel load cells. The load cells are further improved by a special heat treating process. This results in scales that are much less likely to be damaged.
Another vital characteristic is a digital display that provides easy to read weight results. Arlyn industrial scales use a large LCD graphics screen that not only provides the weight information, but also clearly notes the units of measurement, any tare values, and stability indications. The entry of measurement parameters is easily guided by menus that prompt the user for the appropriate items.
Storing and recording the weight of the hazardous materials are of primary importance. The Arlyn electronic scales are available with a wide variety of formats for data output. The most common type used is RS-232. This output may be directly connected to the correct type of computer printer to provide a hard copy of the data, or to print labels to document the waste containers. Many computers may also be provided with RS-232 connections so that they may accept the scale data directly. Universal Serial Bus (USB) is quickly becoming the prevalent data communication standard. All of the Arlyn scales, including the bench scales and platform scales, may be provided with a USB connection. Easy to use Windows based software is also included to import the data into different kinds of spreadsheets and databases. These formats offer the user the ability to print this data in a wide variety of ways. An additional data transmission method is through an Ethernet port, either to a local area network, or directly to the Internet for viewing from any browser based device.
