| OCR Text |
Show The Resource Conser vation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, reauthoriz ed in 1985, r equi r ed the US- EPA to establish regulatory standards for fac i lit i es t hat tr eat , store , or dispose of haz a rdo us wastes. Three major performance requirements have been esta blished that place limits on the emissions of particulate matter, hydrochloric acid, and toxic organic compounds. The current approach on limiting the emissions of toxic organics is based on the demonstration that a given facility can achieve a combined destruc-tion and removal efficiency (DRE) of 99.99% for principal organic hazardous constituents (POHCs) of the waste stream that are con-sidered difficult to incinerate. The demonstration of 99.99% DRE for these compounds is effectively acting as a surrogate for the minimum DRE of other compounds in the waste fuel that are more easily incinerated. Thus, under the current regulatory approach, an ac-curate ranking of hazardous waste incinerability is critical to adequately controlling emissions of toxic organics. Initial field studies have shown that removal efficiency of most POHCs has a mini-mal impact on stack emissi~n, thus we may focus our efforts on determining POHC destruction efficiency (DE). [1] Calculations and experimental observations have shown that the emissions of undestroyed, residual POHCs are kinetically, not ther-modynamically controlled. [1,2J The destruction efficiency of POHCs ~ is dominated by the temperature, time, and reaction atmosphere ex-perienced by the POHCs in the high temperature zones of incinerators. Thus, determination of the exact time, temperature, and reaction atmosphere history of all the molecules in an incinerator is neces-sary to determine the actual DE of a POHC. This type of information |
