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.

Introduction to Hazardous Waste Incineration, Second Edition The control of hazardous wastes is one of today's most critical environmental issues. Increasing numbers of engineers, technicians, and maintenance personnel are being confronted with problems in this important area. Incineration has become an available and vital option to meet the new challenge of containing hazardous wastes. Introduction to Hazardous Waste Incineration, Second Edition provides a reference work that examines the basic concepts, principles, equipment, and applications pertaining to hazardous waste incineration. Uniquely serving as both an essential guidebook for practicing engineers and a text for engineering students, this new edition contains updated information in the area of standards and regulations, equipment, materials handling equipment, instrumentation, control performance testing, final permit, and facility design. The authors' aim is to offer the reader the fundamentals of incineration with appropriate practical application to the incineration of wastes, in addition to providing an introduction to the specialized literature in this and related areas. Complete with illustrative examples, this informative Second Edition highlights: * Recent history of standards and regulations, including the recently enacted MACT Standards for hazardous waste combustion * Incineration principles, including stoichiometric calculations, and thermochemical considerations * Equipment that may be found in a waste incineration facility (i.e., incinerator, waste heat boiler, quench systems, and air pollution control equipment) * Design principles and their application to a hazardous waste incineration facility * Practice problems at the end of each technical chapter Introduction to Hazardous Waste Incineration, Second Edition offers chemical and environmental engineers working in the hazardous waste control area, as well as technicians and maintenance professionals, the necessary literature to cope with some of the complex problems encountered in waste incineration today.

This novel approach to textbook publication is made up of a book plus a computer diskette. The book contributes to the ability of environmental engineers to solve hazardous waste incineration problems by presenting almost 100 specific problems and their solutions. It also contains a user's guide to software provided on the diskette. The diskette itself contains procedures that provide thermochemical calculations relating to waste incineration, stoichiometric calculations of incinerator emissions and incinerator design.

A comprehensive guide to the design, selection, and operation of incineration systems for hazardous waste. Table of Contents: Introduction; Incinerator Regulations; Boiler and Industrial Furnance Regulations; Rotary Kiln Incineration Systems; Liquid Waste Incineration; Waste Sludge Incineration; Site Clean-up; Waste Destruction in Industrial Processes; Incineration at Sea--European Technology; Materials Handlings; Emission Generation; Air Emissions Control Systems; Acid Gas Control; Heating Valve Determination; Incinerator Calculations; Systems Calculation; Metric Calculations; Energy Recovery; Appendices; Glossary; Index. Illustrations.

Hazardous waste in the environment is one of the most difficult challenges facing our society. The purpose of this book is to provide a background of the many aspects of hazardous waste, from its sources to its consequences, focusing on the risks posed to human health and the environment. It explains the legislation and regulations surrounding hazardous waste; however, the scope of the book is much broader, discussing agents that are released into the environment that might not be classified as hazardous waste under the regulatory system, but nonetheless pose substantial hazards to human health and the environment. It provides a background of some of the major generators of hazardous wastes, explains the pathways by which humans and wildlife are exposed, and includes discussion of the adverse health effects linked to these pollutants. It provides numerous case studies of hazardous waste mismanagement that have led to disastrous consequences, and highlights the deficiencies in science and regulation that have allowed the public to be subjected to myriad potentially hazardous agents. Finally, it provides a discussion of measures that will need to be taken to control society's hazardous waste problem. This book was designed to appeal to a wide range of audiences, including students, professionals, and general readers interested in the topic. - Provides information about sources of and health risks posed by hazardous waste - Explains the legislation and regulations surrounding hazardous waste - Includes numerous case studies of mismanagement, highlights deficiencies in science and regulation and discusses measures to tackle society's hazardous waste problems

This is the second edition of the WHO handbook on the safe, sustainable and affordable management of health-care waste--commonly known as "the Blue Book". The original Blue Book was a comprehensive publication used widely in health-care centers and government agencies to assist in the adoption of national guidance. It also provided support to committed medical directors and managers to make improvements and presented practical information on waste-management techniques for medical staff and waste workers. It has been more than ten years since the first edition of the Blue Book. During the intervening period, the requirements on generators of health-care wastes have evolved and new methods have become available. Consequently, WHO recognized that it was an appropriate time to update the original text. The purpose of the second edition is to expand and update the practical information in the original Blue Book. The new Blue Book is designed to continue to be a source of impartial health-care information and guidance on safe waste-management practices. The editors' intention has been to keep the best of the original publication and supplement it with the latest relevant information. The audience for the Blue Book has expanded. Initially, the publication was intended for those directly involved in the creation and handling of health-care wastes: medical staff, health-care facility directors, ancillary health workers, infection-control officers and waste workers. This is no longer the situation. A wider range of people and organizations now have an active interest in the safe management of health-care wastes: regulators, policy-makers, development organizations, voluntary groups, environmental bodies, environmental health practitioners, advisers, researchers and students. They should also find the new Blue Book of benefit to their activities. Chapters 2 and 3 explain the various types of waste produced from health-care facilities, their typical characteristics and the hazards these wastes pose to patients, staff and the general environment. Chapters 4 and 5 introduce the guiding regulatory principles for developing local or national approaches to tackling health-care waste management and transposing these into practical plans for regions and individual health-care facilities. Specific methods and technologies are described for waste minimization, segregation and treatment of health-care wastes in Chapters 6, 7 and 8. These chapters introduce the basic features of each technology and the operational and environmental characteristics required to be achieved, followed by information on the potential advantages and disadvantages of each system. To reflect concerns about the difficulties of handling health-care wastewaters, Chapter 9 is an expanded chapter with new guidance on the various sources of wastewater and wastewater treatment options for places not connected to central sewerage systems. Further chapters address issues on economics (Chapter 10), occupational safety (Chapter 11), hygiene and infection control (Chapter 12), and staff training and public awareness (Chapter 13). A wider range of information has been incorporated into this edition of the Blue Book, with the addition of two new chapters on health-care waste management in emergencies (Chapter 14) and an overview of the emerging issues of pandemics, drug-resistant pathogens, climate change and technology advances in medical techniques that will have to be accommodated by health-care waste systems in the future (Chapter 15).