The correct treatment of medical waste produced by structures that carry out medical activities such as prevention, diagnosis, care, rehabilitation and research is a legal obligation and a fundamental protection for public health, and requires the application of strict safety protocols essential to prevent accidents and contamination and to operate in compliance with current regulations.
CAMEC designs and builds customized plants for the treatment of medical waste capable of managing even the most hazardous medical waste, i.e. those that pose an infection risk, allowing structures that handle these materials to transform hazardous waste into a crushed mass similar to urban solid waste in complete safety. Here's how this process works.
The first step in optimal management of medical waste is their correct differentiation, which must be carried out directly by the operators working in each structure to separate medical waste assimilable to urban waste (such as packaging, kitchen waste, waste collected in bathrooms or corridors of structures, etc.) from hazardous waste.
Once this initial differentiation has been made, hazardous waste follows specific treatment paths necessary to crush and sanitize them, eliminating their bacterial load. Once hazardous waste reaches the treatment plants, the process necessary for their processing is articulated in three different phases:
All these subsequent steps must be carried out in sequence and using special sealed containers, to ensure that there are no leaks or losses during the different stages of treatment. The transport takes place using special stainless steel containers, and the shredder's hopper is equipped with a special guillotine door that closes over the loading mouth as soon as the material is inserted inside. In this way, it is possible to be certain that during the crushing of hazardous waste there will be no leaks of potentially contaminated material.
The hazardous waste thus obtained, still retains its hazardous characteristics, must be inserted into the sterilization tunnel in a controlled manner, through a plant design that avoids contamination and provides for the use of special containers; only once the material has been kept at high temperatures for a certain period of time it is possible to consider it definitively sterilized, and therefore potentially disposable as urban solid waste.
The integrated management of these working phases is essential to prevent contamination and to carry out the entire process quickly and safely, reducing the infection risk to zero. For this reason, CAMEC's integrated plants, custom-designed to manage the movement, loading and crushing of hazardous waste are an effective response that allows structures that handle hazardous waste to achieve impeccable performance, reducing processing times and managing the different stages of treatment in an automated manner, minimizing manual interventions by operators.
In this way, it is possible to transform hazardous waste into waste with characteristics similar to those of urban solid waste in an efficient and safe manner, without risks either for public health or for those who physically operate within the treatment plant.
To learn more about CAMEC's customized solutions for the treatment of hazardous medical waste, contact our team of experts and discover our solutions for loading, crushing and sterilizing hazardous waste.