How to dispose of hazardous waste

It’s time to clean out your garage. Around my house this generally happens when there is too much stuff in the garage to get a car into it. Your mileage may vary.

After a morning of cleaning and rearranging, you’ve got a pile of stuff out at the curb for collection. An old tire, an older battery for a car that you no longer own, old oil, old antifreeze and some leftover, lacquer-based paint. So off to work you go on trash day.

When you return home, however, you’re a little surprised to see all your garbage still at the curb — and a $75 summons on your front door. Hazardous waste can’t go out on the curb, and everything you’ve put out counts as hazardous waste, no matter how commonplace it may be.

Hazardous waste is serious business. About 750 million gallons of used motor oil is recycled in this country every year, and a single gallon of improperly disposed-of oil can contaminate a million gallons of groundwater.

Recycling rules vary considerably from town to town, county to county and state to state. The garage-cleanup items listed above might well be picked up in some areas, but in others definitely wouldn’t. You should be able to get a printed list of recycling policies from the department of public works at your city hall or county seat, or to download one from their Web site.

Some jurisdictions make it difficult. One county I know of takes oil-based paints only at one site on one day every other month, and then only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. — which means that ordinary folks with jobs really don’t have many options.

Here are some tips about what to do with what’s left over after you’ve worked on your car, truck or motorcycle at home.

Used Oil, Filters

I recommend getting an oil drain pan, which you can pick up at an auto-parts store for a few dollars. It should hold 10 quarts, enough for a couple of oil changes, and have a tight-fitting lid, to keep the oil inside until you’re ready to deal with it. This means that you have to handle the oil only every other oil change.

It also should have a grate to hold the filter to allow it to drain completely. Let it drain for several hours or, better yet, overnight. Commercial shops are required to crush or puncture the used filters to facilitate draining.

When it’s time, decant the used oil into clean, dry plastic bottles — empty milk jugs are perfect — and label them as used engine oil. Oil can be purchased in gallon jugs instead of in single quarts, which is worth considering because the jugs can easily be reused to dispose of the used oil.

In most states, any shop that does oil changes is required to take modest quantities of used oil from consumers. The used oil is either recycled back into other petroleum products or burned in special furnaces for heat.

If you do buy your motor oil in quarts, remember to drain the last few drops of oil out of every plastic quart bottle. I’ve fastened a fixture — though a pair of tenpenny nails hammered into the wall works equally well — to the workbench in my shop, to hold a single empty quart upside down over another empty bottle. An hour of draining upside down, multiplied by the residue of four other bottles, or one change’s worth, is often a couple of fingers of oil. Save this for your oil can or for topping off the lawnmower.

Now the empty plastic bottles can be tossed into the recycling with the household plastics without contaminating the entire recycling infrastructure with oil.

Coolant

We used to drain old coolant into a pan and use it for weed control around the garage. Or we poured it into the sink, then flushed the radiator with water from the garden hose. Most of the heavy-metal-laden spillage went into the driveway, and thence into the gutter and storm drains.

A commercial shop can’t do this anymore, as a matter of law, and neither should you. Drain the radiator into a pan, with as little spillage as possible. Fill the system with water and run it until the engine warms up enough to open the thermostat, and then for a few minutes longer to mix thoroughly. Drain, fill and drain again.

This double flush will purge 99 percent of the old coolant. Now you can refill it with the correct amount of fresh coolant and top it off with water.

What to do with the old coolant? Many larger shops have coolant-recycling machines. These actually distill the glycol out of the old coolant, allowing the shop to add an additive package and reuse it as if it were new. The water boils off, and all that’s left is a few teaspoonfuls of sludge.

Call around to find one of these machines, and the shop will probably let you drop off your old coolant. But there’s one very important caveat: Use a clean drain pan and funnel, and use clean containers to ferry the coolant. If you use the same drain pan for oil or other solvents, and if even a few drops of oil wind up in the coolant, it can’t be recycled.

Paint, Gasoline

Most automotive paint used in the aftermarket is solvent-based, either enamel or lacquer. Unfortunately many municipalities won’t take solvent-based paint or its companion thinners as waste.

If you have a secure, well-ventilated place, one that isn’t likely to start a fire or poison children or animals, you can do what I usually do with small quantities of leftover or contaminated paint thinner and gasoline: Simply leave the can open in a safe, warm place until it dries completely. Don’t try this with coolant, however, because it takes far too long to dry out. Larger quantities should go into the hazardous-waste system. The gasoline additive MTBE, in particular, is turning into a major issue as a groundwater contaminant.

Brake Fluid

Brake fluid is alcohol-based, and is toxic when ingested. When bleeding brakes, catch the runoff in a jar.

Fluid from a jar that was opened more than a few months ago probably has absorbed enough water to reduce its boiling point past the point of safety. To dispose of new or unused brake fluid, pour it into a container of cat litter. The brake fluid will evaporate within a few days.

As with paint, keep this away from pets, from children and from any source of ignition.

Batteries

The toxic lead in car batteries can contaminate ground water. Fortunately batteries are recyclable. Both the sulfuric acid and the lead plates are reusable with only a modest amount of processing.

In most states, when you buy a battery, the vendor will charge you a small fee that will be refunded when you return your old battery, and most of those shops will take in old batteries. Call ahead to be sure.

If they won’t, your city or county will have a place where you can drop them off. There’s no need to dispose of them illegally.

Tires

Who wants a stack of old tires around to breed mosquitoes in the neighborhood?

Some areas recycle tires by using them as supplementary fuel in cement kilns. The very high temperatures required to drive the water out of limestone and transform it into portland cement also ensure the complete combustion of the rubber and fabric of the tires.