SDS Section 13: Disposal considerations

The section written for the people at the other end

Sections 1 to 11 are written for whoever uses the product. Section 13 is written for whoever receives what is left of it — the drum with an inch in the bottom, the rinse water, the spill absorbent, the packaging itself. By the time anyone opens section 13, the product has stopped being a product and become a waste, and a different body of law has taken over.

That handover is the whole difficulty of the section. REACH Annex II gives section 13 exactly one subsection — 13.1, waste treatment methods — which looks thin beside the eighteen properties of section 9 or the itemised PPE list of section 8. It is not thin. The section opens by binding itself to Directive 2008/98/EC, the Waste Framework Directive, as that Directive applies in the Member State where the sheet is being supplied, and it closes by requiring the sheet to refer to the relevant Union provisions on waste — or, where there are none, the national or regional provisions in force. One subsection, two pointers into somebody else’s statute book.

What “waste treatment methods” actually has to answer

Four express requirements sit under 13.1, and each fails in a recognisable way.

Containers and methods — for the contents and for the packaging. Item (a) asks for the waste treatment containers and the methods, and it names two things being treated in the same breath: the substance or mixture, and any contaminated packaging. The Annex supplies its own examples — incineration, recycling, landfilling. A sheet that gives a route for the liquid and says nothing about the drum has answered half of (a) and left the more awkward half open.

The properties that decide which route exists. Item (b) is where section 13 stops being a paperwork exercise. Physical state and viscosity decide whether the waste can be pumped at all. Flash point decides how it can be stored and fed. pH decides whether neutralisation is even a candidate. Decomposition behaviour decides whether heating it is safe. Every one of those numbers is already on the sheet, in section 9 and section 10; item (b) exists so that the person choosing the treatment route does not have to go and reconstruct them.

Sewage disposal is discouraged — in the text, not by convention. Item (c) is three words long and it is an obligation on the author. Silence does not satisfy it. The reasoning lives in section 12: a substance that is toxic to aquatic organisms, or slow to degrade, will pass through a treatment works largely intact and arrive in surface water.

Special precautions for whatever route was recommended. Item (d) closes the loop. If the sheet recommends a route, it owns the precautions that route needs. A recommendation with no precautions attached is an opinion, not information.

The waste code, and why a supplier can only ever suggest one

This is the single most misread line on the whole sheet.

The six-digit codes people call EWC codes come from the European list of waste, established by Commission Decision 2000/532/EC, whose annex was replaced by Commission Decision 2014/955/EU. Article 7(1) of Directive 2008/98/EC makes that list binding for deciding which waste is to be considered hazardous. Codes carrying an asterisk are hazardous waste. So far, so mechanical.

Then read how the list tells you to use it. The instructions define a waste by “the six-digit code for the waste and the respective two-digit and four-digit chapter headings”, and step one is to identify the source generating the waste in chapters 01 to 12 or 17 to 20. Not the substance. The source. Chapters are organised by industry and by process — and if nothing fits, step four sends you to a code ending in 99 in the section of the list corresponding to the activity identified in step one. Even the fallback is anchored to the process.

The consequence is unavoidable: the same material leaving a paint shop, a laboratory and a municipal collection point lands in three different chapters and therefore carries three different codes. The supplier writing the safety data sheet knows the product perfectly and knows nothing whatever about the process that will generate the waste. Any code printed in section 13 is therefore a suggestion for a likely generating process, and the honest sheets say so in as many words. A code stated flatly, with no such qualifier, invites a generator to file waste under a code that does not describe how it arose.

Where the packaging fits

Contaminated packaging is one of the few things in the list that is genuinely process-independent, which is why it sits in the second tier — chapters 13, 14 and 15, examined only when chapters 01 to 12 and 17 to 20 produce nothing. Chapter 15 covers waste packaging, absorbents, wiping cloths, filter materials and protective clothing, and the entry most section 13s need is 15 01 10* — packaging containing residues of or contaminated by hazardous substances. The asterisk is doing real work there: the empty drum is hazardous waste in its own right.

Section 13 in the United States: a real duty in a different document

OSHA does not enforce section 13. Appendix D’s opening says sections 12 to 15 may be included in the SDS but are not mandatory, Table D.1 marks section 13 “(Non-mandatory)”, and OSHA’s own Hazard Communication guidance explains that it will not enforce the content of those sections because they concern matters handled by other agencies. The Table D.1 entry is a single sentence: a description of waste residues and information on their safe handling and methods of disposal, including the disposal of any contaminated packaging. No lettered items, no properties, no drains, no citations.

None of which means there is no duty. It means the duty is written elsewhere. Under RCRA, 40 CFR 262.11 places the hazardous waste determination on the person who generates the solid waste, and requires it at the point of waste generation, before any dilution, mixing or other alteration. The regime also differs in shape from the EU one. 40 CFR 261.33 lists discarded commercial chemical products by identity — the P list for acute hazardous wastes and the U list for the rest — covering the commercially pure grade, technical grades, and formulations in which the chemical is the sole active ingredient. So the US classifies unused product by what it is and generated waste by what produced it; the EU list runs source-first and falls back to material only in chapters 13 to 16. A reader holding both regimes at once will find section 13 useful in both, and authoritative in neither without checking.

How section 13 connects to the rest of the sheet

• The properties 13.1(b) demands are the measured values in section 9 and the reactivity data in section 10. Section 13 should not disagree with either.
• Annex II says the waste information complements section 8 for the safety of people conducting waste management — the same controls and PPE, applied to a different population.
• Section 6 creates most of the waste section 13 has to describe: contaminated absorbent, contaminated soil, wash water. Both sections must keep it out of the drain.
• The aquatic toxicity and degradability in section 12 are the justification for 13.1(c). Sewage disposal is discouraged for a reason recorded one section earlier.
• The classification in section 2 is what puts P501 on the label and what feeds the hazardous properties assessment behind the waste code — and section 15 carries the wider legislation that section 13 has to point at.
• Waste still has to leave the site, and the entry describing that consignment is section 14, not this one.

What a good section 13 looks like

Three tests, all answerable by reading:

1. Is the packaging treated, not just the contents? 13.1(a) names both. If the empty container appears nowhere in the section, the sheet has skipped the part that most often becomes a hazardous waste in its own right.
2. Is the waste code labelled as what it is? A six-digit code with a named assumption about the generating process is useful. The same code presented as a fact about the product is not — the list of waste starts from the source, not the substance.
3. Can you trace 13.1(b) back to a number elsewhere on the sheet? The properties affecting the treatment route should be recognisable from sections 9 and 10. Where they are absent, or where they contradict those sections, the sheet has not been reviewed as a document.