India’s medical waste management system is putting the environment at danger, and its 198 common bio-medical waste treatment facilities and 225 captive incinerators are already overburdened.
While PPE kit trash is disposed of and recycled, the huge levels of smoke created by medical incinerators impact the surrounding community and the environment in general.
To address this environmental load, Dr Binish Desai, a 27-year-old Gujarati doctor, has developed a procedure for recycling PPE kit trash into bricks. He holds a Ph.D. in environmental science and technology and has been working on waste management for over two decades.
Binish thinks that the idea of “waste” does not exist in nature and that garbage is only produced by human use, thus it is our duty to sustainably get rid of it. With this aim, he founded a social enterprise named Eco Eclectic Technologies to work on his eco-friendly innovations and till date the company has 150+ eco-products.
The “recycled medical waste bricks” are made up of 52% PPE, 45% paper waste, and 3% special binder developed by him. As a first start, he developed ‘Eco Bins’ and place them in public areas like as hospitals, police stations, and salons with the assistance of municipal and local organisations in Surat and Valsad.
Following rigorous sanitation and disinfection standards, the material collected from Eco Bins were shredded and combined with industrial paper waste obtained from paper mills.
This liquid is then stored for 5-6 days before being put into molds to solidify. These bricks are then naturally cured for three days before being ready for use.
When dealing with medical waste, it is critical to adhere to safety and sanitary regulations. So the process of creating Brick 2.0 follows the standards given by the Central Pollution Control Board.
Reference- The Hindu, EcoIdeaz.com, Eco Eclectic Technologies website