Austin Hayes Ltd. has provided ammunition container refurbishment and surface coatings services for over 50 years. As an employer committed to protecting employee health and safety, they implement strict guidelines that minimize employee exposure to hazardous materials.
When a customer came to Austin Hayes Ltd. with a request to recycle 20,000 wooden ammunition boxes treated with wood preservative, they faced a new health and safety issue. Certain elements in wood preservative, such as chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), and arsenic (As), can cause significant health problems if inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through the skin.
Taking on this project meant they needed to create a new system that factored in the dangers of handling the contaminated wood.
The Challenge: Finding a Safe and Efficient Inspection Method
Austin Hayes Ltd. suspected only a small percentage of the boxes were contaminated. The challenge was finding an accurate, safe, and time-efficient method to inspect, sort, and segregate the wooden boxes for recycling. But, how?
Austin Hayes Ltd. needed to recycle over 20,000 wooden ammunition boxes.
First, they sent a sample to a local laboratory for testing. They spent two weeks testing to check if the wooden box was treated with a high-grade wood preservative. While the laboratory provided accurate results, they needed a faster and more cost-effective solution to test all the boxes.
“Obviously, we needed to be safe. We didn’t want to contaminate the wood eligible for recycling,” said Nick Eagleton, General Manager at Austin Hayes Ltd. “Sending everything to the lab for testing would be cost prohibitive, so investing in an XRF analyzer made sense.”
The Solution: Processing Contaminated Materials with Handheld XRF
That’s when they turned to the Vanta handheld XRF analyzer. A local Olympus representative met with them to explain how handheld XRF works, discuss its benefits, and demonstrate the instrument. The experience made Nick confident that they could be efficient from their first day of operation.
The Results
The Vanta XRF analyzer was instrumental in their ability to quickly inspect the 20,000 wooden containers.
Employees at Austin Hayes Ltd. test wooden boxes using Vanta handheld XRF analyzers to determine if the material is contaminated.
An employee at Austin Hayes Ltd. tests a wooden box with the Vanta handheld XRF analyzer. Special protocols were followed to handle materials contaminated with certain elements.
The contaminated containers with arsenic were segregated and sent to a special wood processing facility.
“We were able to get accurate results with the XRF analyzer,” said Nick. “We set up the analyzer with a pass/fail test for arsenic to acquire results within 30 seconds.”
Austin Hayes Ltd. attributes their success to being able to safely test materials using the Vanta handheld XRF analyzer. At the moment, their customer is building another stockpile for them to test.
To learn more about how Vanta handheld XRF helped them continue their commitment to employee health and safety, read their story here: Austin Hayes Ltd. Creates New Standards in Health and Safety Using XRF.
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