Wednesday, August 08, 2012

About My New Job

I am working for a large, international aluminum product manufacturing plant, where we make rolled aluminum coils and sell them out to people that want to customize the stuff.  This company is not called Manuel's Mousepad Emporium (MME), but that's what I'm calling it so as to give myself one level of anonymity.  I am in the Health, Safety & Environmental department, where we have two staff environmental engineers and a handful of safety specialists.  My title is, officially, Environmental Compliance Technician.  I'm pretty sure that that is the most prestigious sounding job title I've ever had.

So what do I do?  To answer that would require a small understanding of the rolled product manufacturing facility itself and how the processes work.  In extreme brevity, MME buys recycled aluminum and melts it down to a certain level.  This molten aluminum goes through a casthouse until eventually it is poured into molds and cast as large (~22 feet long) ingots.  The ingots make their way through the mills, getting chopped and scalped and cut along the way.  Eventually they go through a machine that smashes the ingot down over and over, kind of like rolling a piece of clay in your hand until it is a long and thin snake, except the aluminum stays rectangular in shape and not round.  One the aluminum is flattened into a sheet it is then rolled up into a coil (~20,000 lbs.) and hauled off on a crate to sit and await shipping.  That's the short version.

MME also does customized sheets with embossed designs.  There's also a paint process if customers want colored aluminum (and many of them do).

So what do I do?  I basically make sure that all the water that we're pushing out of the property is within the acceptable limits for a variety of things (coliform, chlorine, pH, oil & grease, etc.)  To do this requires a daily visible inspection of our main outfall and the waste water treatment outfall.  In addition to the regulations surrounding a WWTP, MME also has its own drinking water supply.  I am responsible for all the routine inspections of these areas.

Next I work with the waste side of environmental engineering.  There are a few hazardous byproducts left over and I have to make sure that they are properly labeled and disposed of correctly.  Non-hazardous and universal waste regulations also fall into this realm.  MME doesn't generate a lot of varieties hazardous waste, most of it being from paints and solvents.

The last piece of environmental that I deal with is the air side.  Air regulations are some of the most difficult things to understand and regulate.  I have several binders in my office on Air Regulations due to the Clean Air Act from the EPA and I have wracked my mind over the billion+ acronyms and numbers.  There's a lot of stuff that I don't understand right now, but eventually I'm going to have to know everything that pertains to the aluminum industry, or at least a portion of it.  I've not really got into this much yet, but it's coming so very soon.

The EPA has the authority to wage some monstrous fines on violations, so I'm employed to do the routine checks (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) to make sure that we catch any problems and get them corrected before anything major happens.  It's a job that keeps me away from my desk for much of the day, and I'm loving it.  The casthouses are awesome, but I'll have to get into those again some other day.

Until then, I must retire.  I get up earlier now and I have an incredible amount of things going on that I can't disclose currently.  Rest assured, though, that I have not forgotten this blog or the Readers of it.  Perchance once Stewartland is out of my hands things'll swing back closer to normalcy.  Here's to hoping.

8 comments:

David Wagner said...

Wow... that is so far out of my realm of familiarity, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Just reading about it makes me want to head for the door, lol. I'm glad you know what you're doing and, more importantly, enjoy it. Good luck with your new job, and with all of the other unmentionable things you have going on...


Dave the Goof

logankstewart said...

Well, I don't really know what I'm doing, at least not yet. I have a small understanding, but still very much to learn. Eventually I hope to get the hang of things.

Take care!

Anonymous said...

I like the active part of the job description. and the responsibility of it. sounds like really good work.

I worked for the Safety Office for the US Army for two summers while in college and the bosses highly recommended going into Safety; and to be fair it was fun going on the inspections (one of my favorite being a morgue)...

I hope all is and continues to be well with you and yours.

~L

Anonymous said...

Insert sympathy here (the traditional kind, not the Golden Bough kind).

Also, awesomesauce job.

logankstewart said...

@L: Safety is the fraternal twin of Environmental. EPA & OSHA have a lot in common and overlap in several things. I, too, find Safety stuff rather fun. I can't imagine how Safety with the Army would be.

@Lance: Muchas gracias amigo.

Carl V. Anderson said...

So glad you are enjoying the new job! It is nice to have a job where you don't have to be bound to a desk all the time. The number of my outside meetings has decreased this last year and I miss being out and about. I make sure to get up and move around as much as possible during the day so I'm not just tied to this chair all the time.

It all sounds exciting, I'm very happy for you.

logankstewart said...

@Carl: Thanks, friend. God has blessed me incredibly with this.

Anonymous said...

Looks like you have a handful of a job right there. It would be exciting to know how many new things you will learn. It would now be probably best to invest in a small notebook where you could jot down useful information. ; )

Rupert Echard