Environmental Uses of Lime
Municipalities, industrial facilities, utilities, and mining operations rely on lime to help comply with environmental regulations. Lime is used to treat stack gases from power plants, industrial facilities, and medical and hazardous waste incinerators. Lime absorbs and neutralizes sulfur oxides from these gases, helping to prevent acid rain and reducing emissions of hazardous air pollutants, including mercury.
Lime is vital to municipalities, which use lime for potable water softening and to remove impurities from drinking water. Furthermore, lime is a highly cost-effective method to treat sewage sludge and animal waste from concentrated animal feeding operations. Likewise, industrial facilities and mining operations use lime to treat wastewater by adjusting the pH of acidic wastewater, removing phosphorus and nitrogen, and promoting clarification.
As America’s pollution control regulations become more stringent, these applications of lime will be increasingly important to our nation’s efforts to protect our environment. This area provides more detail about these important applications of lime.