Portable Incinerator

Waste disposal is a huge problem around the world. With more and more urbanization the government is finding it difficult to properly dispose wastes, both industrial and household. While household wastes can be composted in rural areas that is not option for the urban community. Most homes depend on municipal/city garbage collectors, and all these wastes are disposed as landfills which is the most popular waste disposal method in developing countries like India. But these landfills cause water and air pollution and causes lots of problems for people in the surrounding areas.

Another method for waste disposal is incineration/combustion. Here wastes are burned in a controlled environment. This method is not without cones, but compared to the long-term hazards posed by landfills this is a better option. But incinerators are expensive, and most people are not educated about the benefits of using domestic incinerators.

The aim of this project is to build a domestic/household incinerator that can be easily moved from one place to another. It should be affordable as well.

How to build a cheap, household incinerator?

A lot of DIY incinerators are available on youtube. This one looks promising;

These incinerators do not use any fuel like kerosene or gasoline. They don’t need electric or any other source of power either. All you have to do is fill the combustion chamber with garbage and put a lighted match stick into it. A crude form of this home made incinerator is known as ‘Burn barrel’ where garbage is burned inside a metal barrel. In India we burn garbage in the open but when burned inside a barrel the fire lasts longer and it also burns better (you must have scene this in many movies, especially as backgrounds in riot scenes). The trick is since the oxygen supply is only through the air holes at the bottom of the incinerator/barrel the fire try to reach to the bottom of the garbage where the air supply is more. It is like what happens when you burn a heap of garbage from the bottom but here instead of burning up the flame burns down (or kind of like that).

How to make this portable then? Add a couple of wheels to the bottom! Think of a oxygen cylinder cart, implement a similar mechanism with handles so you don’t have to touch the hot barrel. This design has some cones the main one being, the incinerator is not insulated. If you touch it while burning garbage you are sure to fry your hands. Another is you cannot burn all kinds of wastes in it, like chemicals which will create poisonous gases on burning. Implementing a scrubber to separate solid particles from the fume also is a big plus, otherwise we can’t call this environmental friendly.

Now as you can see this is a simple project, but this cannot be used to incinerate industrial wastes. For such cases commercial incinerators are available which have the facility to remove all hazardous chemicals from the fume.