The chief wastes from the wool scouring industry are wool grease sludges, which arise from partial effluent treatment. These sludges contain dirt and wool grease in varying proportions as well as mixtures of short fibre, fibre fragments, sand, vegetable matter, suint and dags. All of these wastes also contain a high level of organic material and toxic sheep dip pesticides together with wool scouring and effluent treatment additives. These sludges are being produced in ever increasing amounts, because scouring companies are progressively required by regulations to treat their effluent more rigorously before discharge to sewer. In the West Yorkshire region of the United Kingdom alone, the wool scouring industry produced about 30,000 tonnes wet weight sludge in 1999. There is currently no sustainable means of disposal of sludge from the partial treatment of wool scouring effluent. At present, landfill offers an economical, readily available option for disposal of scouring sludge. However, as landfill sites become scarcer and constraints are being introduced in terms of content of waste for landfill, this option will become increasingly expensive and untenable. The authors in this work have aimed to seek a more environmentally friendly and commercially profitable means of disposing of sludge by incineration, using the novel batch rotating kiln that specially designed for this project. This method not only minimises the amount of waste significantly, but also eliminates the amount of toxic or potentially toxic components.
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