Lignite coke is increasingly employed as an adsorbent for flue-gas cleaning, for example, in waste incinerators. The aim of the studies described here was to verify the assumed deposition reliability of moving bed adsorbers even in the case of operational malfunction. To this end, the occurrence of glow clusters in coke beds loaded with various pollutants such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), hexachlorobenzene (HCB), polychlorinated dibenzodioxins and dibenzofurans (PCDDs, PCDFs) was simulated and the thermal behavior of adsorbed compounds recorded by quantitative measurement of the coke pollutant and of the desorption gases. Assuming an incident that would lead to the spontaneous ignition of the adsorber, the results of our studies show that due to the desorption or decomposition reactions of PAHs, PCDDs and PCDFs, as well as HCB as a model substance for high-chlorinated compounds, only small fractions of pollutants are released.