A little less hazardous and radioactive waste will end up in Hanford landfills thanks to the initiative of workers at CH2M Hill Hanford Group.

The Department of Energy has given the contractor one of its five "Best in Class" awards and one of two "High Achievement" awards for 2007 for pollution prevention, CH2M Hill announced Monday at a celebration for workers.

Although safety rules at Hanford call for regulations to be followed precisely, the Pollution Prevention awards show there also is room for employee innovation, said John Fulton, CH2M Hill president.

For the High Achievement Pollution Prevention award, workers researched and found a way to recycle lead, said Bill Taylor, assistant manager for environmental safety and quality for DOE's Hanford Office of River Protection.

They found Toxco, a Tennessee company willing to recycle lead that may have some slight radioactive contamination for reuse in DOE projects. None of the recycled lead is released to the public.

CH2M Hill has since sent 50,000 pounds of materials containing lead to the recycler.

That included monitors that have lead components, shielded containers for lab samples, shielded transport casks and scrap lead used for shielding workers from radiation.

Recycling the lead avoids the costs of treating it as a hazardous material for disposal, plus the disposal costs. The team that developed the recycling program was led by Grady Willingham of CH2M Hill and Catherine Louie of DOE.

The second award was for a program that replaced plywood boxes with metal boxes for packaging and shipping low-level radioactive waste created at the tank farms to a subcontractor just offsite for treatment or to be cut into smaller pieces.

The 4-by-4-by-8-foot plywood boxes could be reused an average of one time, said Mike Jennings, CH2M Hill deputy director of waste services.

They were difficult to decontaminate and needed to be kept in excellent shape to pass Washington State Department of Transportation inspections, said Cindy Stratman, one of the CH2M Hill team leaders on the project.

The metal boxes cost more initially but can be reused up to 10 times, although some also are used for disposal, Jennings said. In addition, the boxes have been customized to make them easier for workers to lift and they provide radiation shielding for workers.

The change is expected to save about $200,000 a year. The team that developed the project was led by Yousef Shehadeh, Jim McGrogen and Stratman of CH2M Hill and Louie of DOE.