Safe disposal and effective destruction of clinical wastes.

In this edition of the Journal of Hospital Infection, Kanemitsu et al. report their findings from laboratory studies intended to evaluate the efficacy of incineration as a method for sterilization of clinical wastes. High-temperature incineration is regarded as a wholly effective ‘gold standard’ method for the sterilization of wastes, although few attempts have been made to obtain ‘proof of process’ and formal evidence for this has been lacking. Kanemitsu et al. seek to address this issue and, in so doing, raise wider questions regarding the relative merits of the available waste-disposal technologies. It is almost impossible to reproduce the complex physical and thermodynamic conditions of the incinerator under laboratory conditions. In a modern incinerator, wastes entering the combustion chamber quickly reach temperatures approaching 1000 8C. Supplementary fuel may be introduced to support minimum operating temperatures, with careful and fully automated management of the complex gaseous environment to ensure even and complete destruction of wastes. The fixed temperatures selected by Kanemitsu et al. to simulate the temperatures found in clinical waste incinerators in a static furnace cannot fully reflect the complex dynamics of the incineration process and the interplay between heat source, combustible and non-combustible solids, and the gaseous phase