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2.2 Topic d: Incineration

East Asia/Pacific

Incineration processes are capital-intensive and skilled manpower is required for operation and maintenance. Up-to-date, full-scale incinerators are currently in service only in cities of more industrialized countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. High capital investment, high operating and maintenance costs, and stringent air pollution control regulations have severely limited the use of incineration for disposal.

Singapore operates three plants, all of the same design, incinerating 90% of the daily 5,800 tonnes of MSW collected. No sorting of wastes is carried out before the MSW is fed to the incinerators (except that bulky wastes are crushed). The wastes are mixed and burned using rotating roller grates. Auxiliary oil burners are used to start up the combustion process. Combustion is self-sustaining in some cases, while at other times wood is added. In general, the combustible fraction of MSW is high and in some instances has been raised by moisture-reducing compaction at transfer stations. Total electrical energy recovered from the plants is about 60 MW (250 to 300 kwh/tonne MSW incinerated), some of which is used to run incinerator operations.

Incineration plants in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are of similar design to those of Singapore. Hong Kong has closed its incinerators because they could not meet air pollution standards, but new plants are under consideration. Authorities in South Korea are concerned about local opposition to incinerators and are exploring ways to resolve such conflicts. Plans there call for the incinerated portion of the waste to rise from 3% in 1994 to 20% by 1999.

There are many incinerators in Japan: Tokyo alone has 13. Some MSW incineration facilities in Japan are of two stages: pyrolysis, followed by thermal combustion. Some Japanese cities have made their MSW incinerators the center of community complexes with indoor gardens, meeting halls, second-hand shops, and offices of NGOs.

Modern MSW incineration plants operate quite well in cities of industrialized countries, recovering energy in the form of steam for heating and for electricity generation. Incineration will remain popular in cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo as there is a lack of landfill sites. There is, however, controversy about greenhouse and other gases released by incineration.

In the developing countries, however, there have been many problems with imported incinerators. Some are not operated at a high enough temperature to destroy pathogens, and contribute to air pollution due to lack of environmental controls. The high moisture content and low calorific content of MSW in these countries means that at present incineration is not an efficient process for waste disposal.

Bangkok has installed conventional incineration plants at two of its landfill sites mainly for the incineration of hazardous wastes collected; one has recently been shut down. There is ongoing consideration of incineration in Thailand, but there is also local opposition.

China has one or two incinerators in cities like Shenzheng and Leshan. The one in Shenzheng was purchased second-hand from Hong Kong, when that city decided it could not be retrofitted to meet anti-pollution standards, but it has proved too expensive for Shenzheng to run. Nevertheless, Beihai, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai have all begun constructing pilot plants, with foreign assistance. One reason given is that, although the MSW is not currently suitable for incineration, engineers want to gain operational knowledge for the future.

Surabaya, Indonesia has an imported incinerator that can only operate at two-thirds of its design capacity, because the wastes need to be dried on-site for five days to make them incinerable. Even without air pollution control mechanisms, the cost of incinerating the waste in this instance is roughly 10 times greater than the cost of sanitary landfilling in other Indonesian cities.

In cities of developing countries open burning of refuse is common in landfill sites, to reduce volume. This is especially done where the authority cannot afford bulldozers to compact the deposits.

Often refuse is burned by households at sundown as a means of disposal and to generate smoke to drive away mosquitoes in developing countries. This contributes to air pollution in cities and towns, particularly as there is now much plastic in the household wastes. Some authorities encourage this backyard burning as it reduces the amount of MSW they have to collect.

South and West Asia

Waste in the low-income economies is generally low in paper, plastic, and other combustibles as compared to high- or middle-income economies (although source separation programs will bring about some changes there in the future). As a result, large-scale incineration needs auxiliary fuel. Trained manpower is usually not available to operate and maintain a controlled combustion incinerator or waste-to-energy (WTE) plant. High capital costs and stringent maintenance requirements are further discouragements.

Almost all large cities, however, have experimented with incinerators. The first failure of a municipal waste incinerator in the region was in Calcutta in the late 19th century; the most recent was in Delhi in the early 1990s. There is an abandoned plant in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In the cities of Makkah and Medina in Saudi Arabia, however, several incinerators are still operating as other disposal options are not available. Beirut is debating building a WTE plant, and some Saudi Arabian cities are considering converting existing incinerators to recover energy. No examples of successful and operating WTE plants have been reported.

Incinerators are in use by hospitals in the higher- and middle-income economies in the central part of the region. These incinerators are installed and maintained by private companies and monitored by the local environmental authority. A few hospitals and clinics in the northern area and the Indian subcontinent also use incinerators to dispose of their waste, but most of these cannot attain a high enough temperature to be safe.

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