The feasibility of recovering the waste heat from a small-scale incinerator (designed by Industrial Technology Research Institute) and generating electric power by a linear free-piston Stirling engine is investigated in this study. A heat-transfer model is used to simulate the integration system of the Stirling engine and the incinerator. In this model, the external irreversibility is modeled by the finite temperature difference and by the actual heat transfer area, while the internal irreversibility is considered by an internal heat leakage. At a fixed source temperature and a fixed sink temperature, the optimal engine performance can be obtained by the method of Lagrange multipliers. From the energy and mass balances for the interesting incinerator with the feeding rate at 16 t/d, there is enough otherwise wasted energy for powering the Stirling engine and generate more than 50 kW of electricity. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.