2002

2002 White House Closing the Circle Award Winners

Press Release

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 12, 2002 -- A team from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Los Alamos National Laboratory that devised a unique way to eliminate acid waste at Los Alamos' plutonium facility was recognized Tuesday at the White House.

Team members Aquilino Valdez, Ronald Chavez, Benjie T. Martinez and Don Mullins, all of the Actinide Process Chemistry Group, traveled to Washington, D.C., to pick up a 2002 White House Closing the Circle Award in the Recycling category for their work.

The Nitric Acid Recovery System also won a Department of Energy Pollution Prevention Award.

The White House Closing the Awards program is a national competition among all federal agencies, while the DOE Pollution Prevention Award is based on a DOE complexwide competition. Both awards acknowledge pollution prevention, recycling and affirmative procurement accomplishments.

A common chemical process at Technical Area 55 is purifying plutonium by dissolving it in nitric acid. In the past, the dissolved solution passed through a series of columns, and most of the plutonium was recovered from the solution. Then the liquid waste, contaminated with nitrates, was piped to the Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility at TA-50 and condensed. There, the acid was neutralized, and the plutonium stabilized for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Faced with increasingly stringent regulations governing discharges of nitrates from TA-50, the Laboratory needed to drastically reduce the waste stream from the nitric acid dissolution process.

The team's solution was simple: eliminate nearly all the nitrate discharges to the treatment plant. Beginning last April, the Nitric Acid Recovery System almost eliminated nitrates in the waste stream, and reduced the nitric acid used in processing operations to about 20 percent of the historic usage. The wastewater stream is now 99.98 percent pure water, with no measurable plutonium.

The system recovers nitric acid through fractional distillation, which separates chemicals with different boiling points. Water boils at a lower temperature than nitric acid, so almost pure water is removed from the top of the distillation column, while the reconcentrated nitric acid from the bottom of the column is reused.

The system took nearly four years to develop.

Agencies across the federal government submitted 245 nominations for this year's 26 White House Closing the Circle awards. The honors are given out in seven categories: Affirmative Procurement; Education and Outreach; Environmental Management Systems/Life Cycle Assessment/Environmental Cost Accounting; Model Facility Demonstrations; Recycling; and Waste/Pollution Prevention. Many of the nominations were screened prior to initial judging by individual agencies, after which 16 judges, from academia, industry and government agencies made the final selections.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy and works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories to support NNSA in its mission.

Los Alamos enhances global security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, developing technical solutions to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and national security concerns.

2000

2000 White House Closing the Circle Award Winners

Press Release

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 8, 2000 -- The Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory has won a White House award for its recycling program for junk mail and other recyclable paper products.

Federal Environmental Executive Fran McPoland presented the 2000 Closing the Circle Award during a ceremony at the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to Los Alamos for its Mail Stop A1000 Junk Mail Recycling Program, run jointly by the Business Operations and Environmental Science and Waste Technology divisions.

"It is an incredible honor to receive such a distinguished award from the White House, and I congratulate everyone involved for a wonderful job in making the program an unqualified success worthy of national recognition," said recycling program developer Anthony R. Garcia of the Mail Services Group in BUS Division. Dianne Wilburn of E Division also helped develop the program.

This is the first time that Los Alamos has won such an award, which recognizes federal employees and facilities for successful waste reduction programs in such categories as waste prevention, recycling, purchasing recycled products, environmental preferability, model facility demonstration and sowing the seeds for change. DOE submitted the Los Alamos program to the White House for consideration.

"The junk mail recycling program is one of our biggest pollution prevention success stories," said Jan Watson, solid and sanitary waste project leader for Los Alamos' Environmental Stewardship Office in E Division. "We're very proud of these folks who truly deserve this kind of recognition."

The Mail Stop A1000 Junk Mail Recycling Program began in early 1998. Through it, Los Alamos employees send their unwanted junk mail, transparencies, books, magazines, binders, colored paper, catalogs and other recyclable products to the specially designated A1000 mail address onsite. Mailroom staff also collect these items daily while delivering mail.

After sorting the waste, Los Alamos ships it to various recycling centers statewide, saving about 15 to 20 percent compared to the cost of shipping it to the local landfill, said Watson.

As a result of the program, about 20 metric tons of waste is recycled each month, helping Los Alamos meet waste reduction and recycling requirements specified in the DOE/University of California management contract.

ESO Program Manager Tom Starke said the Closing the Circle award is a national acknowledgement of Los Alamos' commitment to reducing waste wherever possible.

"The Mail Stop A1000 Program is one of several waste reduction and pollution prevention initiatives that Laboratory staff have implemented during the past few years," he said. "We hope that by winning this prestigious award, more and more people become aware of this institution's dedication to reducing waste and pollution at every stage of the process, from cradle to grave."