Preventing Pollution
at Twentynine Palms, California

Battelle is providing support and technical assistance on a pollution prevention and waste management program for the Total Waste Innovations (TWI) Section of the Division of Natural Resources and Environmental Affairs (NREA) Directorate located at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC), Twentynine Palms, California. Whereas off-site commercial contractors were used in the past, TWI, which has nearly 50 staff, is now responsible for collecting, consolidating, processing, packaging, recycling, transporting, and selling or disposing of all waste generated at MCAGCC. The scope of Battelle’s work under this recently awarded task order is to provide support on a variety of unique work elements including business planning; pollution prevention and recycling; compliance; business process improvement analyses; field sampling and analytical testing of multimedia samples; environmental permitting; solid and hazardous waste management; and range sustainability and range munitions/residue management, gleaning operations, certification, and tracking. The primary objective for TWI is to decrease the Combat Center’s costs to operate and manage the waste management programs while increasing revenues to help offset the operational costs.

Battelle’s current pollution prevention/waste management project assignment at MCAGCC is a natural progression in the work that Battelle has been doing at this facility for more than a decade. Since 1992, Battelle has been primary environmental services contractor for the facility. Battelle’s early focus was primarily on environmental remediation. Over the years, the scope of work has included: site assessment; remedial design; remedial process optimization; long-term operations and maintenance; small arms range characterization and lead-in soil remediation followed by design, construction and operational support for bullet containment systems at the small-arms range; and remedial process optimization.

In more recent years, Battelle has collaborated with MCAGCC to establish a Range Residue Processing Center (RRPC), now a key component to TWI, to stage, process, and demilitarize range gleanings such as light-gauge steel, brass, aluminum, and other operational waste streams. Range residue processing greatly improves the marketability of the range residue, and operational costs for the RRPC and TWI are significantly offset through the sale of recyclables. After one year of full-scale operation, the RRPC staged, segregated, processed, and sold over 4 million pounds of range residue. Battelle’s expertise in helping the Combat Center deal with these challenging pollution prevention and waste management issues led to the TWI program that Battelle is now supporting for MCAGCC.

For more information on Battelle’s capabilities in Environmental Remediation, Pollution Prevention at MCAGCC, and/or TWI, contact Mr. Jim Abbott at (614) 424-7781, abbottj@battelle.org or Mr. Al Pollack at (614) 424-3753, pollack@battelle.org; for information on Battelle’s sustainable range management capabilities, contact Mr. Steve Downes at (301) 283-4028, downess@battelle.org.