Solid material comminution or disintegration – Apparatus – With temperature modification of material
Reexamination Certificate
1998-12-28
2001-02-13
Rosenbaum, Mark (Department: 3725)
Solid material comminution or disintegration
Apparatus
With temperature modification of material
C241S073000, C241S100000, C241S152200, C241S606000, C241SDIG014
Reexamination Certificate
active
06186428
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to apparatus for decontamination and disposal of bio-hazardous waste.
BACKGROUND
Many areas in the United States and abroad are facing the problem of safe handling and disposal of medical waste. The situation is aggravated as the number of generating sites multiply. Any contact with bodily fluids generates medical waste, so hospitals, nursing home facilities, home health care services, dental offices, dialysis centers, funeral homes, and many more locations become generators. Problems of disposal are increased by the cost of safe handling which encourages illegal dumping and fouling of beaches with medical waste. There is also an exposure problem in transporting infectious medical waste to incineration sites. The materials requiring safe disposal range from soft bandages and rubber gloves, to paper, textiles, glass, plastics and steel needles.
This bio-hazardous waste has a range of hardness and includes bandages, plastic devices, adhesive tapes, hypodermic syringes or needles, intravenous (IV) needles, surgical gloves, and bottles. This contaminated medical waste is bulky and many truckloads are required when carting this material from large generators or pickup points. While in transport the material remains bio-hazardous. There is a serious liability exposure if a bag accidently falls off the truck while in transit to secondary processing such as incineration. Government agencies are dissatisfied with the incineration system and it is expensive.
Several attempts have been made to solve the medical waste disposal problem by destroying and disinfecting medical waste on site but many of these machines use special blades, cutters, knives or rotors that are expensive to manufacture and maintain and cannot handle both soft gloves and hard glass and steel needles in the same batch. Current machines that use heat for sterilizing cannot handle a wide range of waste in the same batch because some soft items would vaporize, possibly giving off noxious or toxic gasses, before other items would be sterilized.
Some related art shows using vapors to maintain sterilization, not to sterilize. Applying disinfectant to waste prior to completely reducing the pieces to their final size does not insure that all of the surface area of the waste is exposed to disinfectant.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a machine that can handle a variety of bio-hazardous waste in the same processing batch, that is less costly to manufacture and maintain, thus available to more waste generators, and of a scalable design both on volume of waste processed and size of waste items.
SUMMARY
The present invention utilizes some commercially available off the shelf components to reduce manufacturing and maintenance costs, accepts a wide range of soft and hard bio-hazardous medical waste and is scalable. All the waste is subjected to cooling to make even the soft waste materials such as surgical gloves brittle enough for shredding. The waste is crushed to make it suitable for shredding, Further cooling is provided after the waste has been crushed but before it is shredded. This brittle crushed waste is kept brittle by continued cooling in an enclosed demolition chamber and then shredded by inexpensive, commercially available off-the-shelf, replaceable saw blades. The saw blades can be interspaced with hammers, the hammers rotating in the same or in the opposite direction from that of the saw blades. Dado saw blades wherein adjacent blades rotate in opposite directions can be used. The shredded waste then falls into a fogging chamber where the fine pieces are disinfected so that surfaces such as formerly inside-out contaminated gloves will be sterilized, not just the uncontaminated former inside of such a glove. The present invention can utilize a variety of sterilants for disinfecting. As better liquid or gaseous disinfectants emerge, the system can easily utilize them. The shredded decontaminated waste continues into a biodegradable storage bag which can be easily removed from the machine. The present invention includes an optional air tight encasement with an air intake and a filter. This air intake and filter is used to replace air in the airtight encasement, maintains a closer balance to the differential between the internal pressure and the atmospheric pressure and also provides an extra measure of safety that may be required in some installations.
These and other features, aspects and advantages of the present invention will become better understood with regard to the following description, appended claims and accompanying drawings.
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Gerber Michael A.
Robinson Stanley L.
Sarlo Bernard F.
VanClair Stanley
Leikauf, Esq Conrad R.
Rosenbaum Mark
Steriwaste, Inc.
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