KIMBALL — Clean Harbors is bringing a new type of incinerator to its waste disposal facility in Kimball with plans to bring more than 100 new jobs.
Paul Whiting, senior vice president of facility engineering of Clean Harbors, the largest hazardous waste disposal company in North America, said the new plant will focus on destroying drums of hazardous waste.
Paul Whiting checks out preliminary construction on Clean Harbors’ second waste incineration plant at its Kimball location.
“The current plant is heavily designed to burn contaminated soils, so if you have a fuel oil spill or a Superfund site, the current plant is a fluidized bed incinerator and it likes that kind of waste. This (new) plant is specifically designed to burn drummed waste … we can actually shred and incinerate the entire drums of waste and, ultimately, we can recover the scrap metal from the drums,” Whiting said.
The site’s rotary kiln incinerator will burn waste at up to 2,200 degrees, while a secondary combustion chamber will destroy it at up to 1,800 degrees. The rest of the facility will clean and condition resulting gas with the smokestack monitoring emissions to ensure the gas is as clean as possible.
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This will be a “six nines” type of incinerator, officials said, destroying 99.9999% of what’s put in and turning the rest to inert ash or water vapor.
The new incinerator is meant to be an addition to the facility, Whiting said, not a replacement for the current plant in the Nebraska Panhandle. It will increase the capacity of Clean Harbors’ Kimball plant from 50,000 tons of waste per year to 120,000 tons.
Whiting said the company plans to hire between 100 and 125 new employees to staff the new plant. These workers would largely be sourced locally, from the Panhandle or the Front Range of Colorado.
The company could build new housing in Kimball to assist with growing its workforce.
Clean Harbors executive Paul Whiting poses with a photo of a Clean Harbors plant. A new incineration facility in Kimball, planned to open in 2024, will add more than 100 jobs.
The Kimball plant currently employs around 185 people.
Currently, the plant’s construction is in the planning stages. It will start in earnest in September with a scheduled completion date of June 2024.
Clean Harbors operates at five locations: four in the U.S. and one in Canada. The Kimball plant, located five miles south of the city, began operations in 1996.
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