Sunlight could be used to convert hazardous medical waste into clean hydrogen fuel, using a new technique being developed by a joint Wales/India team led by Swansea University researchers. The project has just been awarded £47,000 of funding by the Welsh Government. The NHS already spends £700 million a year disposing of medical waste. The COVID pandemic is creating vast amounts of additional waste, such as masks and other protective equipment.
Currently, medical waste is disposed of by incineration. In contrast, photoreforming does not generate greenhouse gases and works at ambient temperature. As well as producing hydrogen fuel, the process can also generate organic feedstocks for the chemical industry. This new research builds on the team’s previous work on generating hydrogen from waste plastics. The researchers are now actively looking for industry partners to commercialise their technology.
Dr Moritz Kuehnel, project lead and senior lecturer in Chemistry at Swansea University, says: ”Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a global surge in single-use medical waste and PPE polluting the environment such as disposable face masks littering beaches. The NHS already spends more than £700m every year on waste disposal, even before COVID waste. Applying our technology to reprocess just 1% of this waste would save millions and mitigate pollution at the same time.”
Source: Eurek Alert!
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