Resilient Safer Approach to cope the oily waste generation in industrial facilities: lessons learned from Cuban installations

Nowadays, huge quantities of oily wastewater and oily solid wastes are associated with different industrial activities, which not only may harm the environment and human health but also a performance worsening of the installation. The goal of this study was to establish a resilient approach to cope with oily waste generation in industrial facilities. Several lessons learned from Cuban installations studied separately for ten years in the municipality of Cienfuegos were the cornerstone for the model definition. The approach included the development of a novel methodology to address integrated features of loss prevention in the operation of petroleum transport, storage, process, handling, and use. This methodology was designed and improved using the principle of convergence to integrate engineering procedures, standards, technical and management tools. The results from the methodology implementation generated a list of findings translated into industrial failures modes, that can impact both environment and human health. Then, a set of general and specific causes associated including the incidence of the natural events were deployed in different orders. The environmental monitoring around the plants offered a significant sample of points that allowed the spatial representation of how hydrocarbon pollution constitutes a complex network of permanent stress rooted in the territory of Cienfuegos. Moreover, a package of inherently safer solutions was generated as primary prevention, integrating the waste management hierarchy concept. At last, this iterative approach generated a research project to develop a bioremediation technique for the treatment of oily sludge from maintenance operations, which can be neither eliminated for the inherently safer solutions nor disposed to the environment. The lessons learned from Cuban installations enabled the conception of this resilient approach, which represents a framework to improve industrial safety performances contributing to the release reduction of oily waste. In addition, it represents a contribution to increasing the awareness of industrial vulnerabilities in the territorial resilience analysis.