Municipal Waste Combustion Study

Incineration has been used widely for waste disposal, including household, hazardous, and medical wasteâ€"but there is increasing public concern over the benefits of combusting the waste versus the health risk from pollutants emitted during combustion. Waste Incineration and Public Health informs the emerging debate with the most up-to-date information available on incineration, pollution, and human healthâ€"along with expert conclusions and recommendations for further research and improvement of such areas as risk communication. The committee provides details on: Processes involved in incineration and how contaminants are released. Environmental dynamics of contaminants and routes of human exposure. Tools and approaches for assessing possible human health effects. Scientific concerns pertinent to future regulatory actions. The book also examines some of the social, psychological, and economic factors that affect the communities where incineration takes place and addresses the problem of uncertainty and variation in predicting the health effects of incineration processes.

Incineration of Wastes address the developments in the application of the combustion process to the incineration of solid municipal and hazardous wastes and examines its fundamental scientific basis. The text covers topics such as the generation and management of hazardous wastes; the fuel properties and process of municipal solid waste combustion; and mass burn systems for the combustion of municipal solid waste, its case studies, and the manipulation of its processes. Also covered are topics such as the production and combustion of refuse derived fuels, the fundamentals of hazardous solid waste combustion, and permanent solid hazardous waste incineration systems. The book is recommended for sanitation engineers and scientists who would like to know more about the use of municipal solid wastes as an energy source through the process of incineration.

The disposal of large quantities of municipal solid waste (MSW) being generated by industrialized countries has become a serious problem. Since it is estimated that within 10 years, half of all municipalities will lack sufficient landfill space, many cities are considering municipal waste combustion as an alternative waste management option.\ Municipal waste combustors have been a source of contention in many local communities and a growing research topic in the scientific community. This book represents a compilation of chapters written by experienced individuals in the areas ofemissions estimation, deposition modeling, risk assessment, indirect exposures, and uncertainty analysis. Estimation of potential human risks associated with pollutants has become an increasing concern. Most often, values required for deposition rates and annual atmospheric concentrations are estimated through the useofatmospheric dispersion models. Chapter 1compares data on the tlatterrain versus the complex terrain dispersion models such as the U.S. EPA Industrial Source Complex Short Term (ISCST) and Long Term (lSCLT). Chapter 2 focuses on the modeling of atmospheric dispersion and dry deposition of fine particulates. A specific size particle (10-20 urn) is used because of its relevance to municipal waste facilities since best available control technology effectively removes particulates above this size range. The deposition ofmaterials from the atmosphere is a critical link in the pathway by which toxic atmospheric pollutants are transported to the surface of food chain components. Chapter 3 describes the importance accounting for wet deposition in risk assessments of municipal waste incinerators.

The annual cost of medical care in the U niled States is rapidly approaching a trillion dollars. Without doubt, much of the rise in costs is due to our health industry's concentration on high technology remediation and risk avoidance measures. From recent public discussions it is becoming in creasingly evident that to contain the costs and at the same time extend the benefits of health care without national bankruptcy will necessitate much greater attention to preventative medicine. The total cost of waste disposal by our health industry is well over a billion dollars. It is rising rapidly as we increasingly rely on high technol ogy remediation measures. Here, too, in the opinion of the authors of this work, it would be prudent to give much greater attention to preventative approaches. Incineration technology has largely been developed for disposing mu nicipal solid waste (MSW) and hazardous waste (HW). As a result of the multibillion dollar funding for the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), most experts believe that pollution control is the key to minimizing toxic emissions from incinerators. This view is now beginning to take hold in medical waste (MW) incineration as well. However, the authors contributing to this book have concluded that precombustion measures can be most effective in reducing the toxic products of medical waste incineration.