Environmental & Hazardous Waste Incinerators
6 environmental waste streams on one permitted LitBurn.
Environmental waste is the only stream on this site that nobody chose to produce. It is dumped on your land, washed up on your frontage, left behind by a spill or dug out of ground somebody contaminated forty years ago. It arrives without notice and in unknown condition, which is why the first step here is assessment and the second is a short, hard list of things that must never enter the chamber.
Four Models,
One Solution
The entry point to the LitBurn range. A 3.3 m³ primary chamber and three burners give continuous 125 kg/h destruction in a footprint that fits a standard yard bay, which makes it the usual choice for a single-site operator replacing skip hire rather than a multi-site waste contract.
The most specified unit in the range. Chamber volume rises to 5.5 m³ for 250 kg/h continuous throughput while the external width grows by only 230 mm over the LBI-125, so sites that outgrow the smallest unit rarely have to rework the slab or the building line.
A 9.6 m³ chamber — nearly double the LBI-250 — for medium-scale industrial waste destruction. At this size most operators pair the unit with heat recovery, because the thermal output during a full shift is large enough to displace a dedicated water heater.
The largest LitBurn: a 16.2 m³ chamber running 500 kg/h continuously. Specified where waste arrives faster than a batch unit can clear it — large manufacturing sites, industrial estates, and operators consolidating several smaller waste contracts onto one machine.
6 Streams,
One Machine
All 6 destroy at the same condition, so one permitted LitBurn covers the lot. What changes is the procedure and the waste codes.
A remediation site produces two very different things. One is contaminated soil, which belongs in thermal desorption or licensed treatment and not in any chamber. The other is everything the works generate around it — liners, geotextiles, sorbents, PPE, screenings, debris — which is hazardous, bulky and expensive to consign. That second one is what this page is about.
Contaminated land arisings in fullAdds 17 05 03* and 15 02 02* to the permit, and one boundary stated before anything else: soil is not a charge. What comes in is the contaminated materials the works produce, drained and screened.
Hazardous scope means a bespoke permit
Burning hazardous waste needs a bespoke environmental permit from the Environment Agency, SEPA or NIEA with the hazardous codes named and a site-specific dispersion assessment — not a standard rules permit. Expect the consent route rather than the equipment to set the date of the first burn.
Assessment comes before handling
Clearance and incident waste has to be characterised before it is moved, because the classification decides the route and the exclusions. On this stream that is a survey rather than a label on a bin, and it is the control that keeps asbestos and pressurised vessels out of a charge.
1,100°C where halogenated content exceeds 1%
Chlorinated solvents, salt-laden marine arisings and POPs-bearing material all push a charge past the 1% halogenated organic threshold, raising the secondary-chamber minimum to 1,100°C. This sector should assume the higher condition and design the permit application around it.
Records survive the journey being removed
Hazardous waste produced and destroyed on the same site still needs to be classified and recorded. What disappears is the consignment note for a movement that no longer happens — not the duty of care, and not the obligation to know what you had and what became of it.
What Ships
With The Unit
Identical whichever stream it is specified for. The operating procedure changes; the machine does not.
Dual-chamber unit, 1,100°C capable
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds. Environmental waste is the stream most likely to carry halogenated content — chlorinated solvents in contaminated arisings, salt-laden marine debris, POPs-bearing material — so the 1,100°C condition is stated here rather than treated as an exception.
Front dual-door loading
Charged through a front dual door at floor level, so bulk bags, tote bins and wheeled skips go in at the height a site telehandler already works at. Clearance waste arrives in whatever it was collected in, and it is not decanted.
IP6X control panel with cycle logging
PLC control with chamber thermocouples, interlocked charge door and a time-stamped temperature record per run. For hazardous waste produced and destroyed on one site, that log is the evidence behind a consignment record nobody drove anywhere.
Burner set and fuel train
Configured for natural gas, LPG, diesel, biofuel or hydrogen. This stream runs wet and dirty — flood silt, harbour arisings, screenings — so burner support does more work here than on a dry industrial charge.
Coretex refractory lining
Monolithic castable lining rated for the full range and replaceable in service. Environmental loads swing from saturated to solvent-bearing between one bag and the next, and the lining is specified for that cycling rather than for a steady feed.
Stack, dispersion data and commissioning
Stack to the height your site-specific dispersion assessment calls for, the emissions data pack the permit application references, on-site commissioning, a witnessed first run and operator training. Hazardous scope means a bespoke permit rather than standard rules, and the assessment is the long pole.
How One Burn Runs,
Start To Finish
One run is one countable event, reconciled against a manifest and evidenced by a time-stamped temperature log.
The Same Cycle,
Whichever Stream
Every environmental stream runs the cycle below. What differs between them is the procedure at the charge door and what the permit has to name — not the machine and not the combustion condition.
Clearance and incident waste is characterised before it is handled: what is in it, what it is contaminated with, and whether it is hazardous. Every other sector on this site knows that at the point of production. Here it is a survey, and getting it wrong is what puts asbestos or a cylinder in a bucket.
Asbestos, gas cylinders, drums with free liquid, batteries and electrical items come out first and go to their own routes. On this stream that is not housekeeping — it is the step the whole operation depends on.
Saturated arisings are drained and allowed to drop their free liquid before charging. A wet load burns below the plate rating; a load with standing liquid in it is a different waste stream that has not been separated yet.
Fed through the front dual door while the unit runs, with two-second secondary retention above 850°C — 1,100°C where the charge carries more than 1% halogenated organic content, which this stream does more often than any other.
Residue is well above the 3–5% a clean charge gives whenever soil, silt, grit or sand is in the load, because none of it burns. The run log and the weights close the hazardous waste record for material that never left the site.
What You Can Burn —
And What You Can't
Every stream has its own accepted list and its own exclusions. They sit on the 6 stream pages, not here.
Can you legally burn environmental waste on site?
Technically, yes: the chamber destroys almost everything these streams produce at 850–1,200°C, and capability is rarely the constraint. What your site is allowed to burn is set by your environmental permit from the Environment Agency, SEPA or NIEA and the waste codes written into it. Open the stream you are dealing with for its accepted list and the materials that never go in whatever the permit says — or send us the codes you hold and we will tell you what they cover.
Send us your waste codesOne Machine,
All 6 Streams
What changes between streams is the operating procedure and the waste codes on the permit. The machine does not change.
Same Condition,
Every Stream
All 6 streams destroy at the same condition: 850–1,200°C in the primary chamber with flue gas held above 850°C for two seconds in the secondary. That is why one permitted LitBurn covers the lot rather than needing a machine each. What differs is the procedure at the charge door and what the permit has to name.
These are continuous-duty units, so throughput is a function of operating hours rather than cycles. Where a site runs several of these streams through one unit, size on the combined arisings rather than on whichever stream prompted the enquiry.
Hours = arisings ÷ burn rate. Ash = 3–5% of what went in. Check the chamber volume as well as the rate: bulky loads fill the box first, dense ones reach the rating first.
Send your combined arisings across the streams you run and we will confirm the model, the run time and the permit route.
Related Products
& Services
Complementary equipment and engineering services for your process.
Sizing and background
The two calculators that size this duty, and write-ups from our own work on environmental incineration.
- [TOOL]Work out the burn rate for your own arisings
- [TOOL]Size the combustion air and flue gas duty
- [BLOG]Ash management from industrial waste incinerators
- [BLOG]Integrating vibration analysis for incinerator predictive maintenance
- [BLOG]Advanced gas cleaning for ultra-low emission incinerators
- [BLOG]Evaluating flue gas cleaning systems in industrial incinerators
Environmental Questions
Answered against the published figures for the LitBurn range, not a generic sheet.
An environmental waste incinerator is a dual-chamber unit permitted for hazardous and contaminated waste arising from land, water and incidents rather than from a process: remediation site materials, spill response arisings, flytipped waste cleared from private and public land, flood and storm debris, marine and harbour arisings, and the screenings and media from water treatment. It is worth being precise about what this equipment does and does not do, because this is the sector where the claims usually get loose. It destroys the organic and contaminated *materials* — sorbents, geotextiles, liners, PPE, debris, screenings, filter media, mixed clearance waste. It is not a soil remediation plant: bulk contaminated soil is mineral, it does not burn, and it belongs in thermal desorption, soil washing or a licensed treatment facility. Loading soil into a chamber produces ash at nearly the weight you started with. The combustion condition is 850–1,200°C in the primary with two-second retention above 850°C in the secondary, rising to 1,100°C where the waste carries more than 1% halogenated organic content. This is the stream that reaches that threshold most often — chlorinated solvents in contaminated arisings, salt in marine debris, POPs-bearing material in clearance waste — so the higher condition belongs in the permit application from the start. Six streams are specified separately below. What unites them is not a material or a code but a position: somebody has become responsible for waste they did not create, on a timescale they did not choose. The unit exists to shorten the gap between finding it and being finished with it.
Not usefully, and we would rather say so than sell you a machine for it. Soil is mineral: it does not burn, it comes out at close to the weight that went in, and it occupies the chamber the whole time. Bulk contaminated soil belongs in thermal desorption, soil washing or licensed treatment. What this unit takes from a remediation site is the contaminated materials — sorbents, geotextiles, liners, PPE, debris, screenings.
Because the scope is hazardous. Standard rules permits do not cover hazardous waste incineration, so the application is bespoke and carries a site-specific dispersion assessment. That assessment is normally the longest item in the programme, which is why it should start before the unit is ordered rather than after it arrives.
Asbestos, gas cylinders and aerosols, drums or containers with free liquid, batteries, electrical items and anything radioactive. On this stream those things are found rather than declared, which is why the assessment step exists — a flytipped load or a flood clearance will contain at least one of them often enough that screening is the operating discipline, not a precaution.
More than the range figure. A clean charge leaves 3–5% of input mass; anything carrying soil, silt, grit or sand leaves substantially more, because the mineral fraction survives intact. Size the ash handling and the disposal budget on what the load actually contains rather than on the headline number.
Yes, and that is usually the point — spill response, clearance waste and treatment residues all destroy at the same condition. Every stream needs its codes named at application, the hazardous fractions keep their own records, and the halogenated condition should be declared once and properly rather than stream by stream.
It removes the consignment note for a journey that no longer happens. The classification, the record of what you produced, and the duty of care on the residue that does leave are all unchanged. A shorter chain, not an exemption.
Size on the surge, not the average. Environmental arisings are lumpy by nature: nothing for a month, then ten tonnes after a storm. The LBI-125 covers routine clearance and spill response; if flood or major-incident response is the reason for the purchase, the LBI-375 or LBI-500 is what turns a fortnight of waiting into a few days of running.
Waste containing persistent organic pollutants must be destroyed rather than landfilled, and incineration at the permitted condition is the route. It has to be identified at assessment and named in the permit — it is one of the reasons clearance waste from domestic settings is worth characterising properly rather than treating as ordinary mixed refuse.
Ready to
Incinerate?
Send the stream, the volume and the site constraints. We will confirm the model, the permit route, and what the specification has to say to satisfy the regulator.
- Hazardous scope means a bespoke permit
- Assessment comes before handling
- 1,100°C where halogenated content exceeds 1%
- Records survive the journey being removed