Dental Waste Incinerators
Practice clinical waste from a dental group, consolidated for destruction — amalgam strictly excluded.
A single dental practice produces a wheelie bin of clinical waste a week and pays a collection charge that behaves as if it produced a tonne. A group of thirty practices produces something worth destroying properly. This page is written for the group, the corporate and the community dental service — and it is blunt about the one material that must never enter the charge.
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 dental practice waste.
The size for a dental group or community dental service: thirty practices' worth of waste in about four hours a week.
Amalgam is 18 01 10* and never incinerated
Waste amalgam, capsules, separator contents and amalgam-bearing teeth are hazardous mercury waste requiring licensed recovery. Amalgam separators are mandatory in dental practices, and putting their output through a chamber defeats the control they exist to provide.
18 01 03* for the infectious fraction
Contaminated disposables and infectious sharps are 18 01 03*; non-infectious sharps are 18 01 01. A group destruction point needs the codes for every practice it takes waste from named in its own permit.
Moving waste between your own sites is still a movement
Practice-to-hub transport is carriage of waste: a registered carrier, the correct documentation and the duty of care apply even where both ends of the journey belong to the same company.
HTM 01-05 stays a practice matter
Decontamination and infection control in dental practice are governed at the chair and in the decontamination room. A group unit changes where the waste ends up, and nothing about how the practice runs.
Why Burn It
On Site
4 things change on the day this stream stops leaving the site.
Practice collection charges scale badly
A small producer pays for a vehicle visit, not for a weight. Across thirty sites that is thirty visits a fortnight for volumes a single run would clear, and the tariff barely moves when a bin comes back half full.
One destruction point instead of thirty contracts
A group with a central unit replaces a collection agreement per practice with an internal route and one permit. The duty of care documentation collapses from thirty chains to one.
Storage in a small surgery is the constraint
A practice has no clinical waste store worth the name — a locked bin in a back room, usually. Shortening the hold to a group's collection round rather than a contractor's calendar takes pressure off the smallest sites first.
The amalgam route stops being an afterthought
Writing the exclusion into a destruction procedure forces the separator waste, the capsules and the extracted teeth into the licensed recovery route they were always supposed to take. Practices that never quite got round to it stop having the option.
Dual-chamber unit, 1,100°C capable
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary chamber holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds. Clinical charges are PVC-rich — IV bags, giving sets, suction tubing, sterile packaging — so where the stream carries more than 1% halogenated organic content the secondary minimum rises to 1,100°C, and the unit holds it as built rather than as an upgrade.
Front dual-door loading
The LBI range is charged through a front dual door at floor level. Wheeled 770-litre clinical carts, rigid-bodied sharps bins and red-lidded anatomical containers go in at the height they arrive at, which is what keeps the last handling step in a clinical waste route a push rather than a lift 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, 1,100°C capable
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary chamber holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds. Clinical charges are PVC-rich — IV bags, giving sets, suction tubing, sterile packaging — so where the stream carries more than 1% halogenated organic content the secondary minimum rises to 1,100°C, and the unit holds it as built rather than as an upgrade.
Front dual-door loading
The LBI range is charged through a front dual door at floor level. Wheeled 770-litre clinical carts, rigid-bodied sharps bins and red-lidded anatomical containers go in at the height they arrive at, which is what keeps the last handling step in a clinical waste route a push rather than a lift 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. For clinical waste that record is what turns a claim of destruction into evidence of it — the condition an infection control audit or a permit compliance check asks to see.
Burner set and fuel train
Configured for natural gas, LPG, diesel, biofuel or hydrogen, with three burners across the LBI range. Fuel choice is a site decision; the combustion condition is identical whichever is specified. Wet loads — anatomical waste, suction liners, fluid-heavy dressings — draw more burner time, not a different machine.
Coretex refractory lining
Monolithic castable lining rated for the full temperature range and for sustained running at the top of it. Replaceable in service rather than requiring the shell to be scrapped with it, which matters on a unit running shifts against a daily arisings curve rather than single burns.
Stack, dispersion data and commissioning
Stack supplied to the height your site-specific dispersion assessment calls for — hospital sites usually carry the tightest one on this list, with wards, intakes and neighbours all inside the assessment — plus the emissions data pack the permit application references, on-site commissioning, a witnessed first run and operator training.
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 18 01 03* for the infectious fraction and one hard exclusion that overrides everything else: nothing amalgam-bearing, including extracted teeth with fillings, ever reaches the charge door.
Infectious disposables into the clinical bag; sharps, needles and cartridges into the rigid container; amalgam, capsules and teeth with fillings into the amalgam pot. Three destinations, decided chairside and never afterwards.
Amalgam waste and separator contents go to licensed mercury recovery, not to the group's unit. This is the step where a practice-level shortcut becomes the group's permit breach, so it is a check rather than an assumption.
Sealed bags and locked containers travel to the group's permitted site labelled with the practice they came from. The label survives to the run record.
Containers and bags go through the front dual door closed. Primary combustion with two-second secondary retention above 850°C, or 1,100°C where the run carries more than 1% halogenated organic content.
Residue is 3–5% mineral ash plus the inert metal fraction from needles and burs. The run log and the practice labels let the group evidence destruction site by site.
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
- Contaminated disposables from the surgeryGauze, cotton rolls, bibs, gloves, masks, aspirator tips and barrier films contaminated with blood or saliva, bagged at the chair.
- Dental sharps in rigid containersNeedles, local anaesthetic cartridges, scalpel blades, burs, matrix bands and endodontic files, charged in sealed UN3291 containers as they left the practice.
- Extracted teeth without amalgamSound teeth and roots with no amalgam restoration, treated as anatomical-adjacent clinical waste in a rigid container. Any filling present sends the tooth to the amalgam route instead.
- Impression and prosthetic wasteSet impression material, wax try-ins, temporary crowns and single-use trays contaminated in the mouth and not recoverable for the laboratory.
- Single-use instruments and small equipmentDisposable mirrors, probes, tips and single-use rotary instruments where the practice policy is single use rather than reprocessing.
- Infection-control and decontamination consumablesWipes, pouches, indicator strips and cleaning consumables from the decontamination room, where contaminated in ordinary use.
No: never charged
Not a permit question — these stay out
- Dental amalgam in any formWaste amalgam, capsules, separator contents and amalgam-bearing sludge are 18 01 10* hazardous mercury waste. Heat volatilises mercury — incineration is the one route that must never be taken with this material.
- Extracted teeth with amalgam fillingsA restored tooth carries the mercury with it. Whatever the tooth is, the filling decides the route: licensed amalgam recovery, not the clinical charge.
- Fixer, developer and imaging chemicalsSilver-bearing radiographic chemistry is a hazardous liquid waste with its own recovery route. This class of unit is not a liquid injection plant.
- Lead foils and shieldingLead from film packets and aprons goes to metal recovery under its own hazardous classification. Nothing about it is improved by putting it through a chamber.
Can you legally burn dental practice 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 codesDoes a 30-practice dental group justify a unit?
Arithmetic on published model figures, not a customer reference. Your numbers go through the same steps.
How This
Was Worked Out
30 practices × 15 kg = 450 kg a week; against the LBI-125's 125 kg/h that is under 4 hours of running, or half a shift a week for the whole group. A single practice is 15 kg a week — seven minutes of running. The case here is consolidation across sites you control; without that, a collection contract is the honest answer and we will say so.
LBI-125
≈4 h a week
None — licensed recovery
2.5 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.
Dental practice waste Questions
Answered against the published figures for the models specified for this stream, not a generic range sheet.
Dental clinical waste is the contaminated disposable output of a surgery: gauze, cotton rolls, bibs, gloves, masks, suction tips, impression material, matrix bands, and the sharps stream of needles, anaesthetic cartridges, blades, burs and endodontic files. Most of it codes as 18 01 03* where contaminated with blood or saliva, and the sharps fraction under 18 01 01 or 18 01 03* depending on contamination. The stream is defined as much by what is excluded as by what is accepted. Dental amalgam — separator contents, capsules, waste amalgam and extracted teeth with amalgam fillings — is 18 01 10* hazardous mercury waste and must go to licensed recovery. Heat volatilises mercury, so putting amalgam through an incinerator turns a contained hazard into a stack emission. That is the single reason amalgam separators exist, and the reason this page states the exclusion before the acceptance list. Scale is the other honest point. A practice generating fifteen kilograms a week is seven minutes of running on the smallest LitBurn — nobody buys a machine for that. This page is written for the operator with thirty of them, or a community dental service, or a group already running a central store: the case is consolidation, and it works only where the practices are yours to consolidate. Where that case holds, the combustion condition is the standard clinical one — 850–1,200°C primary, two-second retention above 850°C — and the operating rules are the ordinary ones: sharps containers charged sealed, bags charged unopened, nothing sorted at the door.
30 practices × 15 kg = 450 kg a week; against the LBI-125's 125 kg/h that is under 4 hours of running, or half a shift a week for the whole group. A single practice is 15 kg a week — seven minutes of running. The case here is consolidation across sites you control; without that, a collection contract is the honest answer and we will say so.
No, and this is the hardest exclusion on the site. Amalgam is 18 01 10* hazardous mercury waste; heat volatilises mercury, so incineration converts a contained hazard into a stack emission. Separator contents, capsules, waste amalgam and teeth with amalgam fillings all go to licensed mercury recovery instead.
Sound teeth with no amalgam restoration can be destroyed as clinical waste in a rigid container. A restored tooth carries the mercury with it, so the filling decides the route regardless of anything else about the tooth. If there is any doubt, it goes to the amalgam route.
No. Fifteen kilograms a week is roughly seven minutes of running on the smallest LitBurn, and no sizing arithmetic makes that a purchase. The case appears at group scale — around thirty practices, or a community dental service — where consolidation replaces a collection contract per site.
Yes, but it is still carriage of waste. A registered carrier, the right documentation and the duty of care apply between your own sites exactly as they would to a third party. What you remove is the external contract, not the paperwork on the road.
They go into the rigid sharps container with the needles and are charged sealed with it. The glass fraction reports to the ash as inert residue. What must not happen is a cartridge being emptied or separated at the practice — the container stays closed from the chairside to the charge door.
Neither goes through the unit. Fixer and developer are silver-bearing hazardous liquids for a recovery route, and lead foils and aprons go to metal recovery under their own classification. Both are collected separately at the practice, which is the same discipline the amalgam pot needs.
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.
- Practice collection charges scale badly
- One destruction point instead of thirty contracts
- Storage in a small surgery is the constraint
- The amalgam route stops being an afterthought