Trommel fines are a by-product produced during the recycling process, they are composed of a mixture of materials and have historically been sent to landfill. This is due to their supposed high levels of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) when tested in chemicals laboratories. The standard method of TPH testing in labs is gas chromatography which picks up background organics and classes them as TPH, this causes increased levels of TPH which are consistently found to be above the 1000 mg/kg hazardous threshold. The impact of this is that there has traditionally been no other disposal option for trommel fines except landfill. This presents a problem as landfills in the UK fill up and will soon be out of use, so how will trommel fines be disposed of in the future?

MTS have a solution. In order to ignore background organics and achieve an accurate result for TPH an alternative method of analysis is necessary. MTS have adopted the use of a QED hydrocarbon analyser which can differentiate background organics and TPH in order to give a reliable result of TPH. The QED analyser uses UV spectroscopy technology and analyses based on a library of hydrocarbon fingerprints stored in the analyser. It recognizes but ignores background organics in the TPH result. This gives an accurate TPH result which will allow trommel fines to be correctly disposed of to a non-hazardous facility.

The QED is accepted by the Environment Agency as a rapid measurement technique (RMT) and has multiple quality control measures in place which assures the results are accurate and the machine is reliable.