DOE Pollution Prevention (P2) Awards
The DOE Pollution Prevention (P2) Awards Program encourages its sites to nominate projects demonstrating exemplary performance in integrating pollution prevention to reduce risk, protect natural resources, and enhance site operations for DOE and White House award programs. The DOE P2 Awards program categories are aligned with the White House Closing the Circle (CTC) Awards.
Sandia National Laboratories has won many of these DOE awards. Click to open a PDF where available, or else hover the cursor over the sampling of recent winners' titles for a brief abstract.
Fiscal Year 2006
- HERMES III Waste Minimization Practices (PDF)
- Metal Recycling from the Disassembly Sanitization Operation (DSO) (PDF)
- Genesis of Electronics Stewardship @ SNL/NM (PDF)
- SNL/CA Earns ISO 14001:2004
Sandia National Laboratories, California (SNL/CA) planned, developed and implemented an effective site-wide EMS that achieved ISO 14001:2004 certification in 22 months, a full year ahead of the original project schedule. The SNL/CA EMS Core team used several effective and unique approaches and techniques to implement the EMS.
- Big Reductions Using a Simple Cleaning Process
A team of employees developed a simple system to improve efficiency in what had been a complicated cleaning process. The main goal of their quality improvement event was to streamline the cleaning of Styrofoam packages used to transport explosive material. The team developed a simple, nearly waste-free nitrogen blow-off process that replaced a time-consuming, hand washing system.
Fiscal Year 2005
- Building 942 High Bay Equipment Reapplication
Sandia National Laboratories/California (SNL/CA) Pollution Prevention program assisted in the decommissioning of the EUVL operations in Building 942 High Bay. The EUVL operations included lithography, electroplating, and molding. During the decommission EUVL equipment; hardware, computers and miscellaneous materials were made available to other researchers onsite and to other DOE facilities. This resulted in approximately 3 million dollars in savings of reapplied equipment.
- Creation of a Printer Supply Exchange
Sandia National Laboratories/New Mexico (SNL/NM) has created a virtual exchange board to facilitate the internal reuse of excess new printer supplies. Since inception at the beginning of the fourth quarter of FY05 as a short-term recycling awareness period, the Toner Exchange has garnered praise and popularity with employees, and transformed into a permanent waste minimizing and cost saving fixture of SNL/NM’s electronic frontier. In just the first quarter of operation, 289 printer supply parts totaling over $45,000 were reapplied to new users, avoiding the need to acquire duplicate supplies that had already been purchased by SNL/NM.
- Water Conservation through Alternative Dust Suppression
Sandia National Laboratories/New Mexico (SNL/NM) has many miles of dirt roads across the site. Several of these roads are on daily or weekly watering schedules to keep the dirt and sand from blowing and causing driving hazards. During the last quarter of FY05, a new product was pilot tested that has the potential to reduce the volume of water used for dust suppression by 5.4 million gallons per year.
Fiscal Year 2004
- Building 805 Decontamination Phase Recycling
Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico (SNL/NM) recently completed the largest decontamination & demolition (D&D) project on site to date. Building 805 was a 75,000 square-feet, three story, chemical laboratory facility at SNL/NM, which underwent D&D during FY03 and 04. Early on in the project, SNL/NM D&D and Pollution Prevention program staff collaborated to implement waste minimization, reuse and recycling opportunities as part of the decommissioning phase for Building 805. As a result of these efforts, over 200 tons of materials were diverted from landfill disposal and an estimated $37,000 dollars of labor costs avoided.
- Construction/Demolition Waste Recycling Center
Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico has implemented a construction and demolition (CD) waste recycling center that accepts waste generated from construction, demolition, remodeling, and maintenance projects. The CD Recycle Center improves waste management practices for small to medium size projects by enabling recycling of many materials previously disposed at a landfill. The CD Recycle Center is not intended for larger projects, which are required to conduct recycling activities directly at the project site. The CD Recycle Center is designed for "one-stop" disposition of construction waste with containers for both recyclable and non-recyclable materials, thereby eliminating trips to the landfill.
