Municipal Waste Incinerators
Black bin residual, street cleansing, litter and bulky waste, destroyed at the depot rather than hauled.
A council depot handles the fraction nobody else wants: black bin residual, street sweepings, litter bin contents and bulky waste that will not go to reuse. It is heavy, dirty and priced by the tonne at a gate that gets more expensive every year. Destroying it at the depot removes the haul as well as the tonnage.
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.
Which Model
Fits Your Volume
Pick a model to see what it clears in a day of municipal & council waste.
A small depot or a parish-scale operation clearing a tonne a week, usually alongside street cleansing arisings.
20 03 codes on the permit
Mixed municipal waste is 20 03 01, street cleansing residues 20 03 03 and bulky waste 20 03 07. Each is named at application; a permit written for one does not silently cover the others.
Separate collection is the precondition
Household dry recyclables and food waste are collected separately under the rules now in force. A unit takes the residual fraction after that, and the collection design is part of the case rather than a detail around it.
Batteries and WEEE have their own obligations
Cells, vapes and electrical items are not residual waste however they arrived in the bin. Screening them out satisfies both the fire risk and the producer responsibility position.
Ash from cleansing waste is a different number
Grit, glass and stones survive the chamber, so residue from street sweepings runs above 3–5%. Size the ash handling and the disposal budget on what the stream actually contains.
Why Burn It
On Site
4 things change on the day this stream stops leaving the site.
The haul disappears with the tonnage
Residual waste is usually driven from a depot to a transfer station or a treatment plant. Destroying it at the depot removes the vehicle movements as well as roughly 95% of the mass that was being moved.
Gate fees and Landfill Tax stop scaling with volume
The residual stream is charged by the tonne at a rate that rises annually. Ash at 3–5% — more with grit — is the only fraction still meeting a gate, and it meets it as a much smaller number.
Street cleansing gets a local destination
Sweepings, litter bin contents and fly-tipping arisings are awkward loads that tie up vehicles for small tonnages. A destination inside the depot turns each one into a short run rather than a journey.
Bulky waste stops occupying the yard
Mattresses, furniture and other bulky items accumulate faster than they are moved, and they take space that a working depot does not have. What burns can go the same day it is assessed as unrecoverable.
Dual-chamber unit, continuous duty
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds. Rated to run for a shift, because mixed waste arrives at the rate a site produces it rather than in charges somebody can schedule.
Front dual-door loading
Charged through a front dual door at floor level, so 1,100-litre bins, cages and wheeled containers are fed at the height they are already moved at. No tipping platform, no hoist, no lifting sacks over a rim.
What Ships
With The Unit
Identical whichever stream it is specified for. The operating procedure changes; the machine does not.
Dual-chamber unit, continuous duty
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds. Rated to run for a shift, because mixed waste arrives at the rate a site produces it rather than in charges somebody can schedule.
Front dual-door loading
Charged through a front dual door at floor level, so 1,100-litre bins, cages and wheeled containers are fed at the height they are already moved at. No tipping platform, no hoist, no lifting sacks over a rim.
IP6X control panel with cycle logging
PLC control with chamber thermocouples, interlocked charge door and a time-stamped temperature record per run. On a residual stream the log is what a permit compliance visit reads, and what a duty-of-care question is answered from.
Three-burner set and fuel train
Configured for natural gas, LPG, diesel, biofuel or hydrogen. Mixed municipal and commercial waste is wetter and more variable than an industrial stream, so burner support matters more here than on a polymer charge.
Coretex refractory lining
Monolithic castable lining rated for the full temperature range, replaceable in service. Mixed waste swings in calorific value between one bin 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 for depot or site staff.
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.
One Cycle,
Start To Finish
Adds 20 03 01, 20 03 03 and 20 03 07 to the permit, and one operational fact the other children do not carry: street sweepings bring grit and glass, so residue runs above the usual 3–5%.
Dry recyclables and food waste are collected apart from residual under the household rules now in force. What arrives at the unit is what is left, and that separation is the whole basis of the permit conversation.
Vapes, loose cells, gas canisters and aerosols are pulled at the tipping area. This is the step that prevents the fire that municipal waste handling is best known for.
Mattresses and furniture are reduced enough to charge through the door. Springs and frames go in with them — the metal comes out inert with the ash.
The unit is fed from bins and cages while running, with two-second secondary retention above 850°C. Wet municipal waste rewards a steady feed and punishes a surge.
Residue is 3–5% for clean residual and noticeably higher where street sweepings bring grit, glass and stones. Plan ash handling on the higher figure if cleansing waste is part of the stream.
What You Can Burn —
And What You Can't
One run takes the whole stream without pre-sorting. What must never enter it is a short, hard list.
Yes: accepted in a run
No pre-sorting between these
- Household residual black bin wasteMixed municipal residual under 20 03 01 — what remains after dry recyclables and food waste have been separately collected.
- Street cleansing residues and litterSweepings, litter bin contents and highway arisings under 20 03 03. Expect a mineral fraction that does not burn and raises the ash figure.
- Bulky waste that reuse will not takeMattresses, upholstered furniture and similar bulky items assessed as unrecoverable; springs and frames report to the ash as inert metal.
- Assessed fly-tipping arisingsMixed dumped material once it has been assessed and separated — the hazardous and electrical fractions routed elsewhere first.
- Contaminated recycling rejectLoads rejected from recycling for contamination that cannot be re-sorted economically, coded as residual rather than pretended into a recycling figure.
- Event and public realm wasteMixed residual from markets, events and public spaces where segregation at source was never realistic.
No: never charged
Not a permit question — these stay out
- Separately collected recyclables and food wasteBoth are legally required to be collected separately and have routes above disposal. Burning them defeats the collection and the hierarchy in one move.
- Batteries, vapes and electrical itemsWEEE and battery waste with their own recovery obligations, and the single biggest fire risk in a mixed municipal charge.
- Gas canisters, aerosols and cylindersSealed pressurised vessels under heat. They arrive in municipal waste regularly, which is exactly why the screening step exists.
- Asbestos, plasterboard and tyresNone of them burn usefully and each has its own route. Plasterboard in particular is a sulphate problem rather than a fuel.
Can you legally burn municipal & council waste on site?
Technically, yes: the chamber destroys almost everything on the accepted list at 850–1,200°C, and capability is rarely the constraint. Legally is a separate question. 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. The never-charged list is different again: those materials are out of scope for the unit or governed by a direction, and no permit wording brings them back in. Send us the codes you hold, or the ones you expect to apply for, and we will tell you which of this list they cover before anything is specified.
Send us your waste codesWhat size incinerator for a depot handling 20 tonnes of residual a week?
Arithmetic on published model figures, not a customer reference. Your numbers go through the same steps.
How This
Was Worked Out
20,000 kg a week against the LBI-500's 500 kg/h = 40 hours, or a full working week of running, leaving 600–1,000 kg of ash instead of twenty tonnes at a gate. Add margin where street cleansing is in the mix: grit and glass do not burn, so both the ash figure and the handling arrangements should be sized on the higher end.
600–1,000 kg a week
≈95% of mass removed
16.2 m³
3.8 t
Send your daily or weekly arisings and we will confirm the model, the run time and the permit route.
Related Products
& Services
Complementary equipment and engineering services for your process.
Municipal & council waste Questions
Answered against the published figures for the models specified for this stream, not a generic range sheet.
Municipal residual waste is what is left in the household black bin once dry recyclables and food waste have been collected separately, plus the streams a council handles alongside it: street cleansing residues, litter bin contents, fly-tipped material once assessed, and the bulky waste fraction that reuse and recycling will not take. The codes are 20 03 01 for mixed municipal, 20 03 03 for cleansing residues and 20 03 07 for bulky waste. Household recycling collections have changed what is actually in that bin. With dry recyclables and food waste out, the residual fraction is more mixed and less recoverable than it used to be, which strengthens the case for treating it as residual rather than weakening it. The destruction condition is the standard one: 850–1,200°C primary with two-second retention above 850°C in the secondary. Municipal waste is wetter and more variable than an industrial stream, so it draws more burner support and benefits from being fed steadily rather than in surges. Two practical facts shape any depot specification. Street sweepings and litter carry grit, glass and stones that do not burn, so ash from those streams runs well above the 3–5% figure a clean residual charge produces. And batteries, vapes and gas canisters arrive in municipal waste constantly, which makes their removal a written procedure rather than a hope.
20,000 kg a week against the LBI-500's 500 kg/h = 40 hours, or a full working week of running, leaving 600–1,000 kg of ash instead of twenty tonnes at a gate. Add margin where street cleansing is in the mix: grit and glass do not burn, so both the ash figure and the handling arrangements should be sized on the higher end.
With an environmental permit naming the 20 03 codes, and with dry recyclables and food waste separately collected first. The permit conversation is about the residual fraction that remains, the dispersion assessment for the depot, and the operating condition — not about diverting material that has a collection route.
They do not burn. Cleansing residues leave a mineral fraction that pushes ash well above the 3–5% a clean residual charge gives, so both the ash handling and the residual disposal budget should be sized on the stream you actually have rather than on the range figure.
Where reuse and recycling have been ruled out, yes — reduced enough to charge through the door. Springs and metal frames come out inert with the ash. Bulky waste is often the fraction that occupies the most yard space for the least tonnage, so clearing it locally is worth more than the weight suggests.
By removing them before charging, as a written step at the tipping area. They arrive in municipal waste constantly and lithium cells are the usual cause of fires in waste handling. They also carry their own recovery obligations, so the step satisfies two requirements at once.
No, and it should not be presented as if it did. Incineration is recovery or disposal depending on the arrangement, below recycling in the hierarchy. What it changes is the cost and the haulage of the residual fraction — the recycling performance is decided by the separate collections upstream.
No. Open burning of waste is unlawful for a business or an authority in this context, and it destroys nothing reliably — the organic fraction disperses rather than being destroyed. The two-second, 850°C secondary condition is the entire difference between the two.
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.
- The haul disappears with the tonnage
- Gate fees and Landfill Tax stop scaling with volume
- Street cleansing gets a local destination
- Bulky waste stops occupying the yard