With four-and-a-half decades in business, Southwest Processors in Los Angeles has gone through many changes.
Twenty years ago this month, Pumper® published its first contractor profile feature on this company. In 1987, Southwest was operating in a distinctive waste-disposal niche: processing grease trap waste from rendering plants and reselling it as a raw material for cattle feed.
Times change. Today, grease represents only about a quarter of what the company takes in, while newer sources of effluent have developed for Southwest to process.
One example: dirty water from car washes. That’s a perennial challenge in the waste disposal industry, but it’s a big source of business for Southwest these days, says owner Richard Jerome.
Southwest’s growth has been comfortable, but one thing remains the same: “Wastewater’s our business,” says Jerome. “We can take any liquid non-hazardous waste.
“We take the solids out of the water, treat the water, and send the water down the sewer,” Jerome says. “The rest, the solids, go to the dump.”
Just how much waste does Southwest handle?
“We’re receiving somewhere between 20 to 40 trucks a day,” says Tony Pecoraro, who supervises operations at Southwest, where he’s been for 11 years. And after squeezing all the water out, the operation ends up with enough 4-foot-square “biscuits” of dewatered solids to fill three to five trucks a day bound for landfills.
Waste Streams
What the biscuits consist of can vary depending on the wastewater load entering the plant.
There’s mud from car washes. “They trap all their water,” Jerome explains, “and they have to have it pumped regularly. They recycle that water to rinse the cars off”— without the mud, which goes to Southwest.
There’s the wastewater from water-filtering operations, such as soft-drink bottlers, along with the used up filtration media — typically ether charcoal or resin beads — from those operations.
There’s waste paint and ink from the construction and printing industries. “This can only be like water-based latex paint, not industrial paint,” Pecoraro says. Most of that is actually from contractors rinsing off equipment. “So it’s going to be more of a highly diluted paint.”
There’s food waste. And then there are certain kinds of industrial wastes. One particularly common substance consists of wastewater from various kinds of industrial cutting. “This is high-pressure water with garnet material in it to cut through metal or stone,” says Pecoraro. “We have places down toward San Diego that make granite countertops and marble countertops.” The cutting process uses water as a coolant, and the runoff — consisting of metal or stone fragments, cutting material fragments, and water — is collected and shipped to places like Southwest.
Then there’s the old standby product — grease from commercial kitchen grease traps. “We do mainly vegetable oils now,” says Jeff Jerome, Richard Jerome’s son. The younger Jerome, a former part-owner of the company, now assists his father in overseeing day-to-day operations.
The recycled grease is sold as a cattle feed component, mainly to operators of feed lots in Mexico, who pick it up from Southwest’s facility, Jeff Jerome says. He estimates grease accounts for about 25 percent of the materials Southwest processes.
Processing Slurry
The company doesn’t take any hazardous waste, Pecoraro says. And while it does get a small amount of horse manure from a stable-cleaning business, it takes no sewage.
The wastewater comes to Southwest in a slurry that is usually about half solids and half water. Whatever its source, it all gets treated basically the same way. It’s run through a plate and frame dewatering press, with the water chemically separated with the help of a lamella clarifier. The process is known as “lime softening’’ that extracts all the solids and leaves behind water treated with chemicals that collects in two, 25,000-gallon tanks. After processing, the water is tested and discharged into the Los Angeles County sewer system.
The collected solids are turned into those so-called “biscuits”— 48 inches by 48 inches by 3 inches thick. They’re usually a dark blackish gray color, but the color varies depending on the materials taken in on any particular day.
“If we get some ink in for the day, it will be the color of the ink,” says Pecoraro. “There’s a paint waste that we take, when they mix all the colors together, it gets a dark, pinkish color.”
The biscuits are dumped into an open containment area, where they further dry out in the sun until they are hauled in dump trucks to the local landfill.
While there’s no sewage, that doesn’t mean there’s no odor, although it is different from the septage odor familiar to liquid waste haulers. As with the color, odor can vary depending on the makeup of that day’s load. “Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where the odor’s coming from,” says Pecoraro. Food waste stands out, having a strong, acidic smell like something gone bad in the refrigerator.
Processors like Southwest are regulated by local, state and federal agencies. Pecoraro and Jerome say they take seriously their responsibility for keeping the waste stream free of hazards. One way they do that is by making each new originator of waste go through a careful screening.
Screening New Loads
When a pumper wants to start bringing in waste from a new generator, a sample of the waste must first go to an independent, government-approved laboratory.
“The pumper will come in and tell the generator that a profile has to be made,” Richard Jerome explains. “The profile will tell whoever takes the material where it came from, the color, the odor of the water, how much metals, grease and other things are in the water.”
After the lab constructs its profile of the potential customer’s waste, Southwest gets a copy. The processing company also takes its own sample and compares that against the independent lab’s profile, Jerome says. Why insist on an outside lab? “We didn’t want the burden on our back for proof,” Jerome explains.
Once a generator has been accepted as a customer, every load of waste that comes in is sampled to make sure it falls in line with the generator’s profile. Accuracy is important for Southwest because of the government regulations it must adhere to — such as how much motor oil it can accept (there’s a 5 percent ceiling on hydrocarbons) or how much lead (12 parts per million under county rules, Jerome says).
As the onsite supervisor, Pecoraro has the power to turn away any load that falls outside the company’s permits, even from generators whose waste profiles have already been accepted.
County health officials conduct random checks, and inspectors have access to the plant whenever they want.
“That keeps us on our toes, but we have a really consistent discharge of water,” Pecoraro says. “The people that have been here a long time — over 15 years — they know what they’re doing, and we don’t have to keep retraining people. They’re very experienced.”
Company Focus Changes
Southwest got its start in 1963, when Jerome, who had worked for a rendering plant, set it up to collect animal fat waste from kitchen grease and meat processors. By 1987 the company had shifted its main business from hauling waste to processing it. The 1987 feature in Pumper focused on a series of investments the company had made in its waste-grease processing operations.
Despite its shift to processing, Southwest still operates pumping trucks of its own and hauls wastewater from certain customers directly. Its pumping fleet consists of three Peterbilt semi-trailer cabs that haul 5,400-gallon, single-compartment, steel-tank trailers, and two Peterbilt bobtail trucks, each with a 2,500-gallon, single-compartment, stainless-steel tank. Another Peterbilt tractor is poised to join the lineup, and will be equipped with a 6,000-gallon, aluminum-tank trailer. Older trucks in the fleet use Caterpillar engines, while the two newest vehicles have Cummins engines.
Southwest buys all its tanks and pumps from Downey, Calif.-based Thompson Tank Inc. Jeff Jerome is a fan of the Thompson pump, which he describes as “a converted Chevrolet engine with compressor heads on it.”
“They’re incredibly low-maintenance,” he says. “They last 10 to 15 years, and when you need to rebuild them you just go to the Chevrolet dealer for parts.”
But Southwest is very clear that pumping is not the company’s primary focus. And owner Richard Jerome strives to work constructively with the members of the pumping industry who bring him effluent to be processed. “We don’t go after anybody’s customers,” he says.
But even with that kind of restraint, the company hasn’t had trouble growing. Today, Southwest has 22 employees and takes wastewater from 7,000 to 8,000 customers, most of it through other pumpers, Jerome says.
He credits his success to the company’s flexibility — such as when a drop-off in the market for cattle feed from grease led Southwest to expand its operations to treat all kinds of wastewater.
It’s a straightforward philosophy for Jerome. “You’ve got to change with the times,” he says. “You have to.”
