Comparison: Organic Emissions from Hazardous Waste Incinerators versus the 1990 Toxics Release Inventory Air Releases.

摘要

Incineration is often the preferred technology for disposing of hazardous waste and remediating Superfund sites. The effective implementation of the technology is frequently impeded by strong public opposition to hazardous waste incineration (HWI). One of the reasons cited for the opposition is the perception that the emission of organics pose an unreasonable threat to human health. While numerous risk assessments for these facilities has demonstrated these risks are very low, this has not totally allayed some of the concerns. In order to put organic emissions in perspective, the mass of these emissions from the incineration of hazardous waste has been estimated using 'reasonable worst-case' assumptions and compared to the 1990 Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) air releases. Comparisons were made for 15 carcinogenic organic compounds and 17 non-carcinogenic organic compounds. Ratios for all but one of these compound-specific HWI emissions to their corresponding TRI air releases ranged from 0.0003% to 0.746%. The total mass emissions (121.7 tons) of all 32 specific organics from HWIs was less than 0.03% of the corresponding 1990 TRI air releases (431,600 tons).