“zero km med-wastes”: smart collection, sterilization and energetic valorisation

Recently a new process to treat med-wastes close to the production sites has been settled-up. The process consists first in a smart collection of med-wastes at the hospitals. Then, med-wastes are grinded and sterilised in an apparatus called ma.ster.waste. The product of the ma.ster.waste, the so-called fluff (sterile and fluffy particles), possesses an average LHV of 25.3 MJ kg–1. Preliminary lab studies demonstrated the feasibility of transforming the fluff into a syngas with an average LHV of 15 MJ Nm- 3. The so-produced syngas can be directly fed to SOFC units, or it can be further transformed into hydrogen through specific CO clean-up processes for feeding PEMFC units for the production of clean energy.