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Tracking hazardous waste
with bar codes
At Lockheed Martin's Georgia facility, portable terminals
with bar code scanners identify and track drums of waste at
64 accumulation locations
The Marietta, Ga. manufacturing facility of Martin
Aeronautical Systems produces fighter and cargo planes, most notably
the F-22 Raptor and the C130J Hercules. Creating these high-tech
birds for the military leaves millions of pounds of potentially
hazardous materials as a by-product. Everything from oil to paint
to cleaning compounds has to be recycled or disposed of properly.
Tracking these materials without sufficient systems could keep a
company grounded. Lockheed Martin, however, turned to bar codes
to track hazardous materials through retrieval, storage, and disposal.
The system meets government regulations and environmental concerns,
while saving many labor hours compared to paper-based monitoring.
There are 64 waste accumulation locations within the 918-acre facility.
Each site is assigned a bar code. Drums for waste accumulation are
placed at each location and assigned a separate bar code. When a
drum is full, Hazardous Waste Operations is notified to remove the
drum to a 90-day storage facility for later disposal.
As full drums are retrieved, the system prints a label for a new
drum to take its place. The empty drum is taken to the waste accumulation
site, where a hand held scanner reads the drum and location labels.
The information is fed to a host computer, which records the drum's
new location.
"We know the locations where the container originated and the final
location where it awaits off-site shipping," says Barbara Foster,
hazardous waste supervisor.
In addition to tracking materials, the hazardous waste team also
inspects every site weekly. Each drum and location is scanned while
inspectors check for leaks and damage. The hand held terminals prompt
inspectors though a government-mandated checklist. The information
is downloaded to a centralized database.
This process used to take a full day with a paper system. Now Foster
can do the job in 90 minutes with greater accuracy.
Reprinted from:
Modern Material Handling/ADC News & Solutions
Cahners Publishing
June1999
Compsee Reseller:
Bar Code & Labeling Consultants, Inc.
(770) 889-9568 - V
(770) 889-7781 - F
www.barcodelabeling.com
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