A steam sterilizer (autoclave) was tested to determine the operating parameters that affected sterilization of microbiological waste. Tests involved standardized loads (5, 10 ad 15 lb [ca. 2.27, 4.54, and 6.80 kg, respectively]) contaminated petri plates in autoclave bags placed in polypropylene or stainless steel containers. Thermal and biological data were obtained by using a digital potentio...

Every year, 4 billion pounds of waste are produced by health care facilities, and the amount continues to increase annually. In response, a movement toward greening health care has been building, with a particular focus on the operating room. Between 20% and 70% of health care waste originates from a hospital's operating room, and up to 90% of operating room waste is improperly sorted and sent ...

Any assessment of plastic contamination in the marine environment requires knowledge of the polymer type and the additive content of microplastics. Sequential pyrolysis-gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (Pyr-GC/MS) was applied to simultaneously identify polymer types of microplastic particles and associated organic plastic additives (OPAs). In addition, a scanning electron microsc...

This paper reports the results on the use of an innovative inert, based on stabilized fly ash from municipal solid waste incineration as a filler for polypropylene. The starting material, which contains large quantities of leachable Pb and Zn, was stabilized by means of an innovative process using rice husk ash as a waste silica source, together with other fly ashes, such as coal fly ash and fl...

Ultrasound imaging techniques are proposed for measuring the shape and thickness of immersed waste particles (10-20 mm size) using a linear sensor array from a fixed position. For these purposes both the front and back surface of a particle needs to be reconstructed. Raw ultrasound pulse-echo and plane wave datasets and different imaging techniques were investigated in a case study using a sing...

The waste that arrives at MBA Polymers’ big blue factory in Worksop, in England’s industrial heartland, is a dirty, smelly mess. Fresh from a metals recycler that has extracted hunks of steel from the crushed remains of cars and other trash, it contains many types of plastic jumbled in with carpeting, rubber, glues, bits of metal and glass, and even the occasional dead animal. Inside the cacoph...

The industrial wastes fly ash (FA) and polypropylene (PP) were used to develop novel green composites using a renewable, cheap coupling agent i.e. stearic acid. The fly ash (FA) particles were coated with stearic acid (SA) in different weight % like 0, 1, 2, 3 and 5. The SA coated fly ash particles were incorporated as filler in recycled polypropylene (RPP) matrix which was obtained from post-c...

Thermoplastic elastomers are a special class of polymeric materials that combine the properties of thermo plasticity during processing and rubber-like behaviour in service. They can be processed in conventional plastic processing equipment, such as twin screw extruders, internal batch mixers, extruders and injection moulding machine, but exhibit vulcanized rubber like ultimate properties (i.e. ...

Plastic waste and its fragments (microplastics, <5 mm) are a global, persistent, ubiquitous threat for land marine ecosystems. We have investigated the occurrence composition of microplastics within 18 coastal fish species northwestern Mediterranean Sea. Digestive tracts were digested using hydrogen peroxide, residues observed under stereo-microscope. Suspected analyzed with Fourier Transfor...