The growing awareness and concern over environmental problems associated with landfill has led to increased demand for incinerators to dispose of municipal waste. The design of an efficient incinerator requires fundamental knowledge of grate combustion and grate mixing, but for such a complex combustion problem, there has been no satisfactory model of the system as a whole. An experimental fixed bed reactor was used to investigate the incineration of simulated waste. Measurements of temperatures and gas compositions were made at several positions within the refuse bed. A mathematical model for combustion of the solid waste in a travelling grate incinerator was developed based on an unsteady-state static bed model. The predictions from the model were investigated and compared to the combustion experimental data carried out in the batch fixed bed incinerator. Although several simplifying assumptions were made during the model development, the final functional form of the predicted data corresponds relatively well with the measured data.