Incineration environmentally degradable

For safe disposal of the products without any adverse effects to the environment, such as recycling and subsequent repolymerization, recycling to olefinic feedstock by pyrolysis, continued burial in landfill sites, incineration, and use of environmentally degradable polymers... 

Today, starch is inexpensive and is available annually from com and other crops, and is produced in excess of current market needs in the United States and Europe (1). Starch is totally biodegradable in a wide variety of environments and could permit the development of totally degradable products for specific market demands. Degradation or incineration of starch products would recycle atmospheric CO2 trapped by starch-producing plants and would not increase potential global warming (2) (see also Environmentally Degradable Plastics). 

This was brought on by the growing pressure to avoid or reduce environmental pollution from waste polymers and plastics, which were accumulating widely on land and in oceans due to careless disposal, and because of the decreasing availability of landfill space for controlled disposal. Options available then, and now, were landfill, incineration, recycle, and controlled environmental degradation. Environmental degradation at that time was almost always referred to as biodegradation... 

Some fraction of the energy and material needed to drive processes and make products will always be degraded to waste that will have to be disposed of in an environmentally acceptable manner, such as incineration or some version of the solidification/fixation process. 

The development of environmentally acceptable incineration technologies for the disposal of hazardous wastes is dependent on an understanding of the roles of (1) atomization or method of introduction of the waste materials, (2) evaporation and condensed-phase reactions of the waste droplets in the incinerator environment, (3) turbulent mixing in the incinerator, (4) kinetics of the thermal degradation and oxidation of the chemical species in question, and (5) heat transfer in the incinerator. 

The non- and mono-ortho CBs have been quantitated accurately in the principal source, namely, commercial PCB mixtures [15, 16] additional environmental sources such as incineration have been identified [17,18] their presence in every ecosystem including the pristine polar regions has been shown [19,20] estimates of their flux in air, water, soil, and the removal mechanisms such as OH reactions in atmosphere and sediment burial in rivers and oceans have been proposed [21] their microbial degradation and biotransformation in organisms have been studied [22,23] a battery of in-vitro and in-vivo bioassays using mammalian, avian, and piscian models for the benefit of risk-assessment of these CBs have been developed [24]. Studies like these in the last decade have resulted in a new awareness of these important class of industrial contaminants. 

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