Short answer is, it depends. High density urban settings might see many benefits from a modern incineration/gasification/plasma arc type of approach if the capital base is there and the volume of material is sufficient. In my opinion, tackling world wide waste issues will not be solved by any single approach but will require multiple technologies/techniques. The most important one is through behavioural change, both at the personal and corporate/government level. Recycling does not typically change behaviour to the extent that it reduces consumption, so the current 'developed' country trends in total waste generation are still linearly increasing (as a result of population growth) but recycling has helped to level off the per capita waste generation. Waste reduction requires some fundamental changes in how we view production in the first place - so cradle to grave approaches from the manufacturing sector can be a part of the solution. Examining alternative materials for packaging can also alleviate some of the pressures on landfills but there are still pressures on municipal systems if the packaging needs to be composted, for example. There is a lot of literature in this area. Good luck.

Rhoda - implementation of modern incineration is not possible in many developing countries because of capital expenditure required. We have observed in many developing countries that the most fundamental aspects of waste management - that is, sanitary approaches - are lacking, and the economic barrier to entry for those technologies is significantly less compared to incineration. If you are really interested in the topic from the material flow and emissions perspective, there are several excellent tools that allow you to examine impacts of different waste management technologies in terms of emissions and economics. For example, the US EPA WARM model (http://1.usa.gov/16mvHWX) is a pretty simple model, while the MSW-Decision Support Tool (https://mswdst.rti.org/) is a much more robust life-cycle analysis tool.

Use of incineration technology depends upon what is the type of waste? Meaning, is it a hazardous or toxic organic waste or is it an organic fraction of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). Incineration technology is capital intensive. From operations point of view, it requires skilled workforce. Thirdly, it requires waste having enough calorific value in order to generate sufficient energy at the end. Fourth, many times in developing countries, incineration doesn't have auxiliary systems to control air, water, noise and solid wastes at place because of which the incineration system creates others problems while solving the first one. However, in most of the developing nations incineration technology is employed to tackle the hazardous and toxic waste materials. And it is fine when biomedical waste or some other toxic industrial waste has to be managed. Obviously, this technology is not used for burning of MSW. Land-filling of organic fraction of MSW is not recommended as per the MSW handling rules in India. Also in my opinion, burning organic fraction of waste is the lost of valuable resource. therefore, processes like aerobic composting, vermi-composting and anaerobic digestion/composting is being employed in most of the developing and underdeveloped nations. In short, incineration is an costly affair and only developed nations can afford it. There are many smart solutions other than incineration in the world. Incineration should only be used when the waste at your disposal is very toxic/hazardous, which if released in the environment accidentally or by any means may cause severe damage to all classes of life forms.

Hi. My opinion is that incineration simply converts a solid waste problem into an atmospheric one. The biggest concern is that the footprint is bigger since air travels faster and further than solid wastes.

Incineration does little beyond reducing the volume of waste and using the power generation as a cost offset to the process. We need to look at waste as an economic resource that can be converted into products used in society today. Shifting the economics changes how we deal with the waste issue.

The technology that can convert organic waste into chemicals used in industry and agriculture today is called Managed Ecosystem Fermentation (MEF). MEF is based on the ecosystem in the first stomach of a ruminant animal. It produces volatile fatty acids, long chain fatty acids, proteins, amino acids and enzymes. The engineering estimates suggest that 1 million tons of organic waste can produce products that would yield $108 million. All of the materials produced are currently derived from petroleum. The unique capability of the MEF process is its ability to convert cellulose into protein. This capability alone would provide developing countries with the ability to generate high protein animal feed to increase the availability of protein in the local economy without having to import the animal feed.

If you would like to receive 2 papers on the technology, please contact me.

It is difficult to add anything to the answers already on here, but in my views this comes down to scale, the fuel itself and the efficiency of the overall process.

With scale, it is hard to justify a very large process which would need to transport waste from outside the local vicinity; doing this adds a high environmental burden in the use of fossil fuels. Not to mention that the additional road traffic causes a nuisance to people living nearby.

For the fuel, mass burn incineration (where residual waste is routed straight to the incinerator) then this, in my eyes, is not making the best use of the waste. This is a better option that landfill disposal, but it doesn't extract materials which have a resource value. In some cases the commodities contained within a residual waste material are actually worth more to the market place as a recycled material than they are as an energy source. So mass burn incineration only makes sense in terms of lower complexity. However when consideration is given to the additional bottom ash, the depleted resources and the lower efficiency associated with the combustion of unprocessed waste, then this doesn't seem like a logical thing to do- environmentally nor economically.

If the fuel was a refined waste material, where resources of value have been extracted prior to thermal conversion (metals and glass as a minimum) then this starts to look more attractive.

So in answer to the question, incineration is a technology which has a place. But it isn't the complete answer. Waste management needs to involve the reduction of waste through public education, recycling where practically (and economically) possible, followed by high-efficiency thermal conversion of what remains.

Waste incineration is a poor solution that generates massive amounts of CO2 and reduces valuable resources. For those two resons alone the modality is not al all sustainable in the long term. With an increasing world population and dwindeling resources the entire production process needs to be changed into articles that are easy to recycle. All households and industries need to recycle at the source and not first throw everything together and than some other organisation needs to separate everythng and try to recycle the most valuabe items.

Waste incineration is an option which has developed as a result of our wasteful consumption industries and habits and never look behind about the rubbish we produce or th consequences to the enviroment. Burning is somehow cleaning our neighbourhood but polluting the world environment. Products that are not easy to recycle should have a high resources tax and products which are durable and easy to recycle should have lower added tax value. With the taxes the recycling technologies should be improved.

Around half of the residual waste is 'biogenic', and therefore is actually renewable energy. The remaining fraction is materials like plastic, which could be recycled. However recycling isn't CO2 neutral in itself when you consider the (fossil) energy required to separate it, transport it and reprocess it. Recycling is, of course, favourable to manufacturing from raw materials.

The resources tax idea is interesting. That would definitely improve the situation. Another consideration with recycling is the Chinese Green Fence policy, which requires materials of very high quality (i.e. very low contaminants); remember that a lot of the EU's recycled material goes to China. This has the effect of cleaning up the recycling industry and the materials which they produce, however it does mean that more potentially recyclable material is rejected and either sent to landfill or incineration.