When we manifest out a 55 gallon drum of used printing ink. I have been told that it is tracked all the way to its final use or destination. One story had ours headed for a large freighter as fuel to be burned. Does any one have any experience with burning dried globs of ink in a steam locomotive? I believe once burned the EPA obligation is over, (except for the global warming lawsuits, of course.)

Let me know when you do so. I want to see if I can see the plume of smoke from over here on the East Coast.

Seriously, consider that more modern newspaper ink (and I assume that's what it is?) is soy-based, not petroleum-based.

Greetings:
While I was still at IRM back in the 70s' our General Manager (always looking to save $s) got us (for free!) a tanker truck load of misc. flammable material to burn in Tuskegee No. 101 a small 2-6-2. We still don't know what all was in that load, but some of it was printer's ink, which formed "meteorites" on the back flash wall of the brickwork and had to be chiseled off on a daily basis. A really hot, nasty chore when running a couple of days in a row. The gunk also built up on the bottom of the tender oil tank. A real mess...
Sometimes it doesn't pay to "cheap it out".
J.David

True - in my experience at the (old) Georgetown Loop we were "given" tanker loads of.......... who knew what sometimes. We got a couple of loads of "real" heavy heating oil one time from a hotel in Denver who had it on hand as a backup for their natural gas heating system. It had been circulating in their system, heated, for who knows how many years. We had to cut it with waste oil to keep it from turning into a solid mass in our tank, but it was some the best fuel we ever used. They actually had more than we could take, and wound up having to pay to dump the rest of it at the Lowrey landfill. That hurt.
Then one year we were given some stuff from the old Gilsonite refinery in Grand Junction, which had been closed years before and was being torn down. I looked at the stuff, and besides having an awful smell it looked thick and black (usually a good sign). So, I took a load. I don't know what this stuff actually was but the engines smelled to high heaven like a chemical factory, gave everybody headaches, and the engines wouldn't make steam to save your life. The guy who gave me the stuff bothered me constantly to take more, which I refused.
We also tried burning used fry oil from our cafe operation, which made the engines smell like french fries. If we would have had a way to filter the stuff and get the lumps of scrapings and loose fries out, it would have probably worked OK. As it was, the lumps and fries kept plugging the burner up, so we had to put a stop to that.
Over the years we probably burned a little of everything that was flammable, and tried to burn a lot of stuff that turned out not to be. I'm pretty sure we never tried burning used printers ink, but who knows.

Phil Johnson

I also recall us getting some used machining and hydraulic oil that got mixed into the fuel tanks. It caused the fire to sputter, making it difficult to control. Also made it difficult to keep up steam due to the erratic behavior of the fire.

Speaking of odd fuels in oil burners... how about crossties in coal-fired engines? We're looking at bringing Flagg Coal 75 to SCRM and we sure have plenty of old ties!

Already been done! In that engine!

There is a potentially significant legal issue with burning some of the “alternate” fuels… If the fuel in question is specifically identified as hazardous, requiring hazardous disposal and documentation, you may find you need to licensed (with fees, permits, and insurance) if you “process” hazardous waste. And burning may be considered processing it.

This probably wouldn’t apply to condemned jet fuel (once drained it doesn’t go back in…), or old fuel oil left in a long forgotten bunker or water contaminated diesel or other fuel oil, but would to the solvent based printers ink, and probably used motor oil.

Additionally, you wonder what might come out the stack along with the smoke… We all get enough exposure to heavy metals and solvents just fixing and restoring the equipment.

In my days at the Loop, we were only required to register as a "hazardous waste disposal site" if we "processed" more than 10,000 gallons of what they considered hazardous waste a year. Since we only used waste oil to cut the #5 slurry we got from the refinery in Farmington, NM, we didn't use more than 10,000 gallons in a year, so didn't have to register.
We did have a guy show up one day with a stack gas analyzer wanting to check the emissions of our #40. I recommended against it, but he went ahead and secured the sensor on the top of the stack with the probe in the exhaust stream. He got data for about 3/4 of the trip when he stopped getting data. When we got to the top of the hill the guy went to check the sensor and let out a yell! 6 inches of the 8 inch long probe had been blasted away by the force of the exhaust and the residual sand from the flues and firebox. He exclaimed about how expensive the equipment was, how was he going to explain this to his boss, etc. All I could say was I tried to tell ya................

Phil

Paybacks are Hell!

If the ink is truly 'old', there are probably some heavy metals within...which accounts for the changeover to soy-based. Be guided accordingly.

DPK

Well, in MY TIME AT TEXAS STATE RR, we had a fella that didn't like trains working in the automotive shop. He used to dump hydraulic fluid/brake fluid/steering fluid/motor oil/antifreeze, etc into the tenders rather than into our certifiable waste disposal system. The idea was to save the use of a few gallons fuel, but erratic firing wasted more fuel than we saved, plus it was hard on the brickwork. It also caused the fire to go out and then relight in the pit a few times (we used off road diesel). The point being that I just ended up draining the bottom 5 or 10 gallons from the tank every time I fired up, so we talkled it over and waste was no longer dumped in the tenders.

Using wacky fuel can definitely be hazardous --- I won't mention the name of the outfit, but it has happened that a well adjusted fire got violent when a gallon or two of stale gasoline or naptha, etc was sucked into the firebox along with that bunkerfull of free recycled oil. In extreme cases it has blown the firedoor off the studs. Yea buddy.

After our Heisler # 3 was re-flued, the fella that did the work said if we ever burned ties in it, he would never help us again. He said some other things as well. His contention was that the creosote was damaging to the flues. Needless to say, ties have been baned from the wood burning Heisler. Coal is ok, but not ties. We have no coal, so it burns pine, and fir when we can get.
dan

www.svry.com

Sammy,

We burned what ever we had or was brought to us - such as dirty kerosene from the shop wash tank, employees and friends waste oil, contaminated fuels - (diesel and gasoline) - in sort, what ever would burn. The important thing is to get the fuels throughly MIXED before trying to fire the engine with it. In our fuel storage tank we had an air line installed through the top that went all the way to the bottom - we'd hook up air to it for 30 to 40 minutes and the bubbling action mixed the fuels nicely. In the fuel bunkers on the engines we'd run the direct tank heaters periodically to keep the fuel mixed. We had very little problem with water in the fuel - except when we had a tank heater valve that was bad and it leaked constantly, slowly adding water to the fuel. If we just could have figured out how to make water burn our fuel bills would have been much lower!

Phil