In a bid to address the challenge of Covid-19 biomedical waste management, the Principal Scientific Advisor of India, K Vijay Raghavan on Wednesday inaugurated a decentralised biomedical waste incinerator at Buxar Municipality, Bihar, the government said.
The technology developed by Ganesh Engineering Works was selected through the ‘Biomedical Waste Treatment Innovation Challenge’ launched in June 2020 by the ‘Waste to Wealth Mission’ – one of the nine scientific missions of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council.
The pilot installed in Buxar is a portable, forced draft incinerator capable of handling 50 kg of biomedical waste made of cotton, plastic, or similar materials per hour, with the provision of waste heat energy recovery.
“The unit requires a two square meter area and requires only 0.6 kWh electricity for initial ignition of the waste with an option of auto electricity turn off,” the release added.
The government said it had received 460 applications from all over the country and three technologies were finally selected for piloting. These technologies will be evaluated for further scale-up in the specific context depending on the results by continuous monitoring and evaluation by the local administration. The monitoring and evaluation data will be available on the waste-to-wealth mission (portal) dashboard.
Raghavan said, “Going forward it is important that Ganesh Engineering use insights from the operational phase and further refine tier technology and explore manufacturing partnerships for scale-up.”