Biomedical Waste Management Technologies for Energy, Fuels, and Other Value‐Added Materials Production and Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

The volume of biomedical waste has increased as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic and increasing dangers to human health and the environment from these highly contagious chemicals, making biomedical waste management even more crucial. The primary focus of this creative review is the potential for resources, liquid, gas, and solid combustibility, thermal electricity, and the generation of electricity from different percentages of medical waste. Promising technologies for treatment and disposal are examined, such as incineration with steam heat recovery, rotary kiln treatment, batch reactor thermal cracking, enzymatic hydrolysis, autoclaving, anaerobic digestion, torrefaction, sulfonation, microwave/steam sterilization, acid hydrolysis, plasma gastification/melting, hydrothermal carbonization/treatment, enzymatic oxidation, pyrolysis with rankine cycle, and so on. Global researchers provided data on the generation of medical waste, which was then divided into two categories: bulky biomedical waste and dangerous biomedical waste. In addition, biomedical wastes were evaluated in terms of their proportions and categorized into several types and categories according to international literature. For the near future, it looks very hopeful that the technologies for treating medical waste can provide materials, energy, and fuels while tackling the problem of managing medical waste.