Emily O'Hagan
Busy with processing waste pickups from University of Utah labs for disposal, shipping dangerous goods worldwide and inspecting lab spaces for proper chemical handling and storage, O’Hagan has seen it all. You will find the gloved and masked O’Hagan, who is employed by the Environmental Health and Safety department at the U, regularly suited up in fire-resistant long-sleeved khaki shirt and navy blue pants moving a wide variety of hazardous materials out of labs and other university facilities to a holding and sorting station before dispatching them to an off-campus facility for incineration. For O’Hagan dealing with dangerous materials is her business.
Mysterious campus corner
A typical day involves arriving at her office, checking email queries about how to dispose of materials as well as how to navigate the Safety Administrative Management System, software for waste submissions. Armed with an overview of the day’s requests., she checks in with the technicians who will do the pickups, what they should pay attention to, and what they will packing into the truck to transfer to the mysterious, hidden Building 590, “our own little corner of campus” near Red Butte Garden.
At the secured and armed 590, many kinds of hazardous wastes, including radioactive materials are stored.
Entering a clean room for an inspection in full PPE
The process of managing hazardous waste is more complicated than you might first imagine. “I can’t follow any regulations until I know what’s in the container,” she says, whether flammable solvents like ethanol, methanol or dichloromethane. “Bleach can’t be mixed with ammonia,” she reminds us of just one example of how volatile unintended chemical reactions can be. This process of “bulking” or consolidating similar materials into 55-gallon metal drums is a big part of her work before the U team contacts Clean Harbors or other third parties to ship out the waste to be incinerated or otherwise safely discarded.
“Once the techs are gone,” she says, "I go through the retaining section, checking dates on the materials that have been dropped off: which is hazardous and which are not, all within four days of their arrival.” In fact, hazardous waste management is highly regulated by local and federal agencies (Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational and Safety and Health Administration, to name just two), and the paperwork and reporting is, naturally, voluminous. In her steel-toed boots, O’Hagan is adept at all of it, largely because of her background in chemistry.
Making research safe
A native of Sandy, O’Hagan’s first choice for a job growing up was to be an astronaut. Her second choice was something related to chemistry. “I always had an affinity for math and science,” she says, and her parents encouraged her to pursue STEM. “So it wasn’t exactly out of the blue—hey guys, guess what I’m going to do: hazardous waste!”
But following graduation with a BS in chemistry in 2022 and an internship working with other chemists to identify, segregate, and pack hazardous waste at Clean Harbors in Tooele, she saw her future, and that future was making science research at the U less dangerous for students and faculty as well as the public.
Emily O'Hagan and College of Science Safety Director working on cleaning out an old glove box. Credit: Jim Muller.
Besides flammable liquids that are bulked, O’Hagan deals with other categories of hazardous waste, including cylinders of flammable and non-flammable gases and flammable solids like metal dust or naphthalene (mothballs). Other discarded materials can become dangerous when wet or spontaneously combustible. Finally, there is a miscellaneous category like used gloves and weigh boats. Most of these items get incinerated. If non-regulated they go to a landfill. Other items like acidic solutions can be neutralized then solidified and landfilled in a secure place.
Since O’Hagan and her team at EHS are into transporting waste, she has to be up to date not only with the EPA and OSHA but with the Department of Transportation and the International Air Transport Associate which regulates shipping and the workers involved with shipping from point-to-point via ground or air. Though too young, perhaps, to have hefted them at home when a youth, O’Hagan refers to the highly detailed manuals she keeps at her desk as “phonebook sized.”
Label, label, label
Keeping us all safe at the U and beyond, O’Hagan is at-the-ready when asked how we can all help with the safe disposal and transportation of hazardous wastes: “I can’t follow any regulations until I know what’s in the container [we receive at our facilities],” she says before adding, “the biggest ‘PSA’ I have is to graduate students to tell us what’s in those containers, in those vials and flasks. Some graduate students [and retiring faculty when they exit their labs] will leave a note for us to ‘check notebook’ and we don’t have that notebook.”
That uncertainty is not the kind of variety, or “spice” that makes Emily O’Hagan’s job gratifying. So, the message is clear: safety first and always whether you’re required at work to wear those steel-toed boots and full-face respirators or not.