SECTION VII. FACILITY AND EQUIPMENT REQUIREMENTS
FOR HAZARDOUS MATERIALS RECOUPMENT
4.37 Requirements for Hazardous Materials Recoupment
A. A hazardous materials recoupment facility must provide a safe working environment that
protects personnel against injury or illness, protects the facility against costly damage, prevents
hazardous materials from contacting incompatible materials or conditions, and prevents release
of hazardous materials into the environment. Ideally, structural, electrical, and mechanical
components incorporated into the facility design (in conjunction with transfer, emergency, and
safety equipment) should accomplish the tasks listed below. However, personnel and procedural
controls (discussed in section VIII) may be required to fully achieve these goals. The facility
design must accomplish the following:
1. Minimize personnel exposure to hazardous materials and prevent personnel exposure to
toxic materials (especially HCCs D2, F5, K2, T1 through T4, and T7).
2. Segregate incompatible materials to prevent dangerous reactions.
3. Eliminate conditions that may decrease a material's stability or usefulness (e.g., ignition
sources, water, warm temperatures, cool temperatures, contamination).
4. Prevent escape of hazardous materials into the external environment.
B. This section will describe basic criteria that must be incorporated into the design of
recoupment facilities; however, authorities at each installation must perform a final assessment to
determine which hazard classes can be safely processed in the available facilities. To make this
determination, personnel must comply with appropriate Federal, state, local, DoD, component,
and host nation regulations concerning handling, transfer, and dispensing of hazardous materials;
applicable building codes (e.g., NFPA codes, NEC), and system safety analyses. Requirements
for flammable/combustible liquids have been included in this section, since a majority of
materials handled by recoupment facilities belong to this hazard class.
C. A recoupment facility should be a completely enclosed building without crawl spaces or
basements. In some cases, recoupment can be performed in a multipurpose facility as long as
walls with a minimum 2-hour fire resistance rating isolate the recoupment area from the rest of
the locations, per NFPA 30. Interior firewalls should extend from the floor to the ceiling and
should extend a minimum of 32 inches through the ceiling if the ceiling has less than a 1.5-hour
fire resistance rating. Exterior walls should have a minimum fire resistance rating of 2 hours.
D. To provide sufficient segregation for safe recoupment of incompatible materials, the facility
layout should have a minimum of six (and preferably seven) isolated recoupment workrooms.
Each workroom should be assigned a group of compatible materials, based on the HCCs, as
follows: (1) flammable/combustible materials (HCCs F1 through F8 and V4); (2) acidic
materials (HCCs C1, C2, C4, C5); (3) alkaline materials (HCCs B1, B2) (these materials also
may be recouped in workrooms assigned to toxic materials or to flammable/combustible
materials); (4) oxidizing materials (HCCs D1 through D4); (5) organic peroxides (HCCs P1 and
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