Incineration of different types of medical wastes: emission factors for gaseous emissions

Previous research works showed that to protect public health, the hospital incinerators should be provided with air pollution control devices. As most hospital incinerators do not possess such equipment, efficient methodologies should be developed to evaluate the safety of incineration procedure. Emission factors (EF) can be used for an easy estimation of legal parameters. Nevertheless, the actual knowledge is yet very scarce, mainly because EF previously published do not include enough information about the incinerated waste composition, besides considering many different waste classifications. This paper reports the first EF estimated for CO, SO2, NOx and HCl, associated to the incineration of medical waste, segregated in different types according to the classification of the Portuguese legislation. The results showed that those EF are strongly influenced by incinerated waste composition, directly affected by incinerated waste type, waste classification, segregation practice and management methodology. The correspondence between different waste classifications was analysed comparing the estimated EF with the sole results previously published for specific waste types, being observed that the correspondence is not always possible. The legal limit for pollutant concentrations could be obeyed for NOx, but concentrations were higher than the limit for CO (11–24 times), SO2 (2–5 times), and HCl (9–200 times), confirming that air pollution control devices must be used to protect human health. The small heating value of medical wastes with compulsory incineration implied the requirement of a bigger amount of auxiliary fuel for their incineration, which affects the emitted amounts of CO, NOx and SO2 (28, 20 and practically 100% of the respective values were related with fuel combustion). Nevertheless, the incineration of those wastes lead to the smallest amount of emitted pollutants, the emitted amount of SO2 and NOx reducing to 93% and the emitted amount of CO and HCl to more than 99%.