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My thesis about electroplating

May 7, 2009

Good day sir,
I am Jennlyn Jariol,a metallurgist and teaching in a university in the Philippines. I'm currently taking up my Masters on Environmental Engineering and recently doing my thesis proposal which is all about reclamation of heavy metals in the electroplating wastewater from a small scale electroplating shop.I hope you can help me on this sir.
This is my first time to write.I am confused about the difference on small scale electroplating and large scale electroplating and what is the basis to classify the electroplating industry/shop as small scale or large scale. I have been searching on the web about it. Thank you and God bless!

Jennlyn Jariol
student - Villamonte, Bacolod City, Philippines

There is not any global definition. To one person, 500 L tanks would be large and to another it might be 50,000 L.
A major difference is the type of plating that is done, IE: gold or platinum would use tiny tanks compared to a shop that plated bumpers.

James Watts
- Navarre, Florida
June 22, 2009

You are the one who wants to do reclamation in a small scale shop, so you are the one who decides what small scale means, Jennlyn.

James offered a good answer. Some plating shops have 5 or 6 waste-paper-basket-size plating tanks, and no employees except the owner. Others have 100 or more employees and a hundred or more tanks each capable of handling a truck bumper or larger. Everything in between exists.

At one point in the USA, the EPA offered more lenient effluent standards to shops which discharged less than 10,000 gallons of wastewater per day, so I suppose you could use that as the cut-off point between large-scale and small-scale if you wish to have something that you can at least make a reference to. (But some physically large shops with many employees manage to discharge less than 10,000 GPD). Good luck.

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
June 23, 2009

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