Developing a Solid Health-Care Waste Incinerator for Disposing Waste Generated from Covid-19 Treatment and Quarantine Facilities

A huge amount of infected or potentially infected wastes has been generated globally since the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). These wastes include not only health-care waste from COVID-19 diagnostic testing and treatment, but also domestic waste generated by COVID-19 infected patients and their close contacts. These kinds of waste potentially contains SARS-CoV-2 so they must be disposed as hazardous waste, which becomes a huge challenge for developing countries that do not have sufficient health-care waste (HCW) disposal infrastructure. This paper presents the results of the study proposing an innovative solid health-care waste (SHCW) incinerator system that was developed from a disallowed-operating SHCW incinerator in Vietnam. The incinerator was designed to meet the regulations of the National technical regulation on solid health care waste incinerator of Vietnam. It had been in experimental operation to incinerate SHCW generated from locally medical facilities for six months in Phu Tho province, Vietnam. The results of emission analysis during the experimental operation show that the innovative system is capable of maintaining the concentration of CO less than 100 mg/m3, the concentration of Dioxins/Furans less than 2.0 ng TEQ/Nm3. The concentrations of SO2, NO2 and HCl were also reduced by 9.8, 18.9 and 55.2 times, respectively, compared with the original incinerator. Additionally, the combustion duration when incinerating high-moisture infectious waste such as domestic waste from quarantine facilities is also reduced by about 30%. The study could support the HCW disposal infrastructure of Vietnam during the COVID-19 pandemic and could be used as a reference by other developing countries for pandemic control.