Balances of contaminants in flue gas from municipal waste incineration plant

Due to current increased interest in the environment protection, the issue of waste treatment has to be solved. Those wastes that cannot be immediately materially used can be treated in many different ways, from landfilling up to thermal decomposition processes. Although landfilling can seem as the most favourable way at the first sight, it is connected with accumulation, pollution of the surroundings and the ground water, prevalence of infections etc. The thermal decomposition processes are necessary not only because of detoxification, but also because of prevention of excessive load of the environment. At the same time, the wastes are becoming a secondary energy source. Yet, the thermal ways also have their difficulties, namely emissions to the air, residual wastes and water pollution. The emissions to the air represent pollutants in the flue gas that are produced during the incineration process and have harmful or even toxic properties. The residual wastes are products that are produced by incineration, namely cinder, ash and fly ash. The incineration plants have a number of technologic equipment serving to flue gas cleaning that use various physical chemical technologic procedures and devices to reach the required cleaning effect (BAT, 2006). To capture gaseous compounds with acidic nature (SO2, HCl and HF) the methods of dry, half-dry and wet cleaning of flue gas are used. The results of technical measurement that should have gained data needed from particular key technologies in the incineration plant to create an overall balance of solid pollutants, particularly heavy metals are be presented in this paper.