Incineration of Wastes from Large
Pharmaceutical Establishments
C. H. P. Arbogast
General Supervisor, Lederle Laboratories Division
American Cyanamid Company
Pearl River, N. Y.
The demonstrated usefulness of many of the war-expanded pharmaceutical and biological products has merely shifted the demand for these
products from the armed forces into civilian channels. The greatly
accelerated growth of the Lederle Laboratories to take care of this demand mushroomed waste disposal into a major problem.
Lederle Laboratories are in the hamlet of Pearl River, New York.
The plant covers 350 acres, of which 150 acres comprise the operational
area. There are 12 miles of road on the property connecting about
150 buildings in which 2,500 people are employed. The water consumption, the electric power required, and the sewage flow produced by
the plant give it a domestic equivalent population of a city of 25,000.
A factor which complicates the waste-disposal problem and at the
same time demands the positive destruction of all putrescible or contaminated matter is the fact that the laboratory is on a water shed that
supplies drinking water for almost the whole of nothern New Jersey.
Up until 1945 waste collection was done by horse- and tractor-
drawn wagons and disposal was accomplished by open-pit burning and
burying. This method required 80 to 100 man hours per day and the
almost constant use of a rented bulldozer to dig and cover pits.
Early in 1945 the disposal problem had developed to the point where
a solution became urgent. The material to be handled consisted, broadly
speaking, of combustible rubbish, garbage, manures, and certain valueless by-products from the plant operations. The bulk of the load was
made up of general factory rubbish, such as crates, boxes, and waste
paper. Many of the raw materials used in the production processes are
delivered in wooden boxes and crates or are paper-wrapped, and even
these materials are rendered highly putrescible because a proportion of
animal or vegetable matter adheres to the containers after they have
been emptied. Garbage represents a relatively small proportion of the
whole, consisting primarily of the residue from the company's cafeteria.
At times as many as a quarter of a million animals from mice to horses
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