Recycling Services Overview

Overview

Recycling Services Overview

Clean Harbors offers numerous alternatives to waste disposal by providing a variety of recycling, reuse and reclamation options for hazardous and non-hazardous materials—including solvents, precious metals, chemicals, oil, light bulbs, transformers and other electrical equipment.

Making a Difference

By committing to waste minimization and waste recycling, companies receive several environmental benefits, including:

  • Conserving natural resources
  • Reducing dependence on landfills and other disposal facilities
  • Saving energy
  • Decreasing your carbon footprint

Clean Harbors Advantages

Clean Harbors finds beneficial uses for your manufacturing by-products: 

  • We recycle oil, antifreeze and other automotive products. 
  • We blend high BTU liquids, solids and semi-solids for use as supplemental fuel used to manufacture cement.
  • We offer a full range of solvent recycling options from traditional recycling to tolling, or a combination of the two. Recovered products that are not returned to customers are available for sale. 
  • We disassemble broken or obsolete electronic equipment, light bulbs, small home appliances and utility company transformers and recycle usable materials. 
Chemical and Solvent Recycling

Chemical and Solvent Recycling

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Our Chicago, Illinois, recycling facility has six distillation columns, one liquid-to-liquid extractor and one mole sieve dryer.

Recycling and reusing chemical solvents can be an economical alternative for your business, and Clean Harbors can give you that option. 

With strategically located recycling facilities, we can recycle used solvents to your specifications and return them to you. If disposal is your preference, we can take your used solvents and recycle them to our own specifications.

Our flexible operations—combined with chemical knowledge and engineering expertise—bring advanced solutions to the challenges of separation and purification. 

  • During the recovery process, components of the solvent/chemical streams are isolated and purified to high-quality product specifications.
  • Clean Harbors Recycling Services employees are experts in recycling and tolling. All processing meets strict local, state and federal regulations and customer requirements. 

We understand the importance of providing a product without cross-contamination, and we consistently deliver quality products.

Recycling Facility Locations

*Rail served

Benefits of Recycling and Reuse 

  • Minimizes waste generation and emissions
  • Reduces waste disposal cost and raw material procurement
  • Has potential to reduce hazardous waste fees
  • Enables more favorable Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reporting
  • Improves public relations and corporate image 

Best Demonstrated Available Technology (BDAT)

  • Supports corporate sustainability goals

Download Fact Sheet (Solvent Recycling Services)
Download Fact Sheet (Solvents for Recycling)

Product Specifications

Clean Harbors offers high quality recovered products.

Download Product Specifications (Recovered Acetone)
Download Product Specifications (Recovered Dimethyl Formamide)
Download Product Specifications (Recovered Ethyl Acetate)
Download Product Specifications (Recovered Isopropyl Alcohol azeotrope)
Download Product Specifications (Recovered Isopropyl Alcohol Industrial Grade)
Download Product Specifications (Recovered Methyl Ethyl Ketone)
Download Product Specifications (Recovered Methylene Chloride)
Download Product Specifications (Recovered n-Methyl Pyrrolidone Industrial Grade)

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Reuse, Recycling and Reclamation

Reuse, Recycling and Reclamation

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Clean Harbors can help your company more effectively and efficiently manage your waste management needs through recycling.

Clean Harbors Recycling and Reuse Program provides a comprehensive step-by-step approach that evaluates your R&D and manufacturing operations and identifies opportunities for efficient waste management. Whether a waste stream or production by-product is sold "as is," recycled or reused, your costs and possible liabilities can be significantly reduced.

Download Chemical Recycling & Reuse Program Brochure

Our comprehensive program will:

  • Reduce waste disposal costs 
  • Minimize waste governed by RCRA regulations, lowering your taxes and annual fees 
  • Create a positive impact on data reported on your TRI reports 
  • Reduce the burden and associated costs of regulatory reporting 
  • Pursue potential buyers of your waste stream 
  • Preserve your reputation as an environmentally safe company by allowing you to publicize new waste minimization programs 
  • Share best practices with other locations within your company to maximize value

We help you:

  • Identify and quantify chemical recycling and reuse options, as well as potential end markets 
  • Interpret and provide guidance regarding regulations 
  • Conduct waste process review and manage logistics 
  • Develop and implement a comprehensive waste management program
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Used Oil and Oil Products Recycling

Used Oil and Oil Products Recycling

Clean Harbors and its subsidiary, Safety-Kleen, offer a full range of used oil products collection and recycling services. We can pick up, transport and recycle your waste oil, oil filters, antifreeze, and used absorbents. We also clean all oil water separators and provide a variety of product sales and services to automotive service centers, dealerships and fleets.

Clean Harbors and Safety-Kleen can schedule routine pickups at your site, or you can make one call when you need service. And, because we transport your used oil products to our recycling facilities, we offer the highly competitive pricing of a one-stop shop. All of our used oil recycling facilities are in full compliance with state, federal and provincial regulations. 

Cost and Environmental Benefits 

Recycling used oil products provides a cost-effective advantage over disposal (fuel blending) or incineration. Our recycling services make the following product reuses possible:

  • Used oil – Re-refined through Safety-Kleen, North America’s largest re-refiner of used oil 
  • Used antifreeze – Remanufactured for reuse 
  • Used oil filters – Utilized as a boiler fuel supplement, burned in approved industrial furnaces and recycled as scrap metal 
  • Oil water mixtures – Processed to reclaim the oil, which will be used as supplemental boiler fuel 
  • Used absorbents – Utilized as supplemental fuel at approved energy recovery sites
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Electronics and Obsolete Equipment Recycling and Disposal

Electronics and Obsolete Equipment Recycling and Disposal

Clean Harbors provides a full line of recycling and disposal services for broken or obsolete electronic equipment.

Broken or obsolete items in your workspace can be a problem when it comes to proper disposal. Clean Harbors provides your solution with a full line of recycling and disposal services for electronic equipment, using a process of breaking down items to separate material that can be recycled from waste for disposal.

Additionally, if you have equipment or technology that should be handled as confidential, our technicians will ensure those items are destroyed and that no technical information can be recovered from any of the data storage components.

Types of equipment and components that can be processed:

  • Electronic business equipment, production equipment with electronic controllers, computers (mainframes) and peripherals (PCs, printers, monitors, tape drives, keyboards, etc.) 
  • Personal home office equipment and products (telephones, answering machines, typewriters, pagers, cellular phones, etc.) 
  • Small home appliances (microwaves, toasters, blenders), entertainment and visual equipment (televisions, video cassette recorders, stereo equipment, cameras, video game players, etc.) 
  • Small FreonTM-containing devices (refrigerators, air conditioners, medical equipment, etc.) can be drained and recycled

Clean Harbors provides maximum flexibility in the types of materials and components being recycled while meeting all federal and state mandated universal waste regulations.

Download Fact Sheet (Electronic Waste Recycling)

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Light Bulb Recycling

Light Bulb Recycling

Clean Harbors provides a variety of options for light bulb recycling and disposal.

Light bulb disposal can be a challenge for many, since a number of bulbs contain materials that can be hazardous. Clean Harbors has your solution with our Light Bulb Recycling services.

We process straight tubes, U-tubes and circular lamps, using a technique that separates the metal, glass, and mercury-containing phosphors, segregating each component into separate containers. The glass and metal are sent to approved local recyclers. All mercury phosphors are sent for refinement at a Clean Harbors-approved retort facility.

Our light bulb recycling process is superior to other bulb destruction units, which typically only crush bulbs, mixing all the components together. Clean Harbors recycles 100 percent of the components of your light bulbs and fully contains any possible hazardous waste.

Clean Harbors Light Bulb Recycling Advantages

  • Responsible alternative to landfill
  • Our in-house capabilities for final disposal reduces liability
  • Superior technology
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