Learning Goals
In the classroom version of this course, the overview of hazardous waste treatment process took 4.5 hours of class time and still was little more than an introduction. What we would like to learn is:
The main types of treatment process
What wastes and situations they are good for
What are their limitations
What are their main design parameters
For instructional purposes, we break the process into: Biological, Chemical, Physical, and Thermal processes, but it is rare for one of these processes to be used alone. Most treatment processes use several different unit processes. Another instructional issue is that many web sites devoted to treatment of hazardous waste deal with cleaning up hazardous waste sites, either Superfund-type cleanup or cleanups of various spills and accidents. Although hazardous waste from cleanups is the most notorious use of cleanup technology, the actual volume of waste from clean ups is much less than waste that is treated in industrial processes and never released to the environment.
Your book, like this lecture, cannot treat any one topic very deeply. On the other hand, if we just skim over the material, most students don't really learn anything. So how to teach this? I'm going to use my slide shows that you can click through. That will give you an overview. There are notes that help explain the slides but if you are in "Slideshow" view you can't see them. If you view in the "normal" view, you can see the notes that supplement the slides. You can view the whole show in normal view, but when you get to a hyperlink, you need to go to Slideshow view to open the page. There are some links to sites with good graphics and also some good instructional sites. So let me suggest you view the shows first. Also, you need to right click on the Slideshow hyperlink then save it to your desktop, then open it. Left click on it, it will open in your browser but then you can't change the views (or at least I couldn't, let me know if there is a trick.) Then read the book, lightly. Finally, Module 10C has some summaries of important topics, you can think of 10C as a detailed learning goals.
Then for homework you will look at some technology sites about waste treatment, and each of you do a mini-report on one technology. Then read and comment on each other's reports. This way you should learn one technology well, get some depth on a few other technologies, and an overview of many technologies and processes.