Abstract

The paper presents and discusses the issue of medical waste (including hazardous ones) and their proper management. Inappropriate handling of infectious medical waste directly endangers the human being health and the environment. Infectious waste must therefore be properly disposed of – one of the most commonly used methods is the thermal treatment in the incinerators tailored for this purpose. During designing an incinerator unit, the diverse morphological composition of medical waste should be taken into account. It affects the entire process, which very often is difficult or even impossible to conduct due to the specificity of the waste. It is also necessary to respect the legal regulations applicable in a given country. Based on the few data concerning the composition of medical waste, the article presents the designing considerations in regard with the incinerator's chambers dimensions. The calculations were carried out for several variants of the waste morphological composition. The own construction of a mobile medical waste incinerator, which is also presented here, complies with the regulations in Poland and the European Union. It should be emphasized that it is a novelty on the Polish market, due to the automatic waste feeder into the combustion chamber, adapted to mobile unit.

Authors (3)