Thermal Plasma Treatment of Medical Waste
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Thermal Plasma Treatment of Medical Waste Xiaowei Cai1 · Changming Du1,2 Received: 17 March 2020 / Accepted: 4 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The harmless treatments of medical waste have significantly drawn people’s attention owing to their risks to health-care staff, the public, and the environment. The traditional thermal technology for processing medical waste may cause indispensable secondary pollution such as dioxin, furan, and heavy metals, and infectious materials that may remain in the solid residual. Thermal plasma technologies offer advantages of effectively treating medical waste due to its high temperature and energy density, lower pollutant emissions, rapid start-up and shut-down, and smaller size of the installation. These benefits play roles in the treatment of medical waste on-site or off-site, especially when somewhere encounters an abnormally sharp increase in medical waste. This paper mainly introduces the typical thermal plasma processes of medical waste and its central component, plasma furnace. Meanwhile, how process parameters influence the formed gaseous and solid products, the performances of mass and volume reduction, pathogen destruction, and energy recovery, are discussed in detail. Finally, the mechanism of the thermal plasma process is also analyzed. Keywords Thermal plasma · Medical waste · Gasification · Pyrolysis · Vitrification
Introduction According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health-care waste includes all the waste generated within health-care facilities, research centers, and laboratories related to medical procedures [1]. Generally, the term medical waste is used interchangeably with the term health-care waste [2]. Meanwhile, the variations in its definitions are used worldwide [3]. In this paper, medical waste refers to any hazardous health-care waste which is potentially infectious, pathological, pharmaceutical, cytotoxic, chemical and radioactive wastes, and any non-hazardous health-care waste. * Changming Du [email protected] Xiaowei Cai [email protected] 1
School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, Guangdong, China
2
Taizhou Institute of Zhejiang University, Taizhou 317000, Zhejiang, China
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Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing
Global concern over the treatment and disposal of medical waste is not fully addressed. Since the generation of medical waste from the healthcare industry has rapidly increased, which is faster than the infrastructure to deal with it. High-income countries generate on average up to 0.5 kg of hazardous waste per hospital bed per day; while low-income countries generate on average 0.2 kg. Moreover, these hazardous medical waste is about 15% of the total amount of waste [4]. Another problem occurs during a disease outbreak. Rapidly increased medical waste brings big challenges to their treatment and disposal. For example, recent COVID-19 outbreak which has been characterized as a pande
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