Back in 2017/18, our team delivered a record number of MP medical incinerators across Punjab Pakistan to support hospitals and health centres across the province. In 2023, following years of successful operation and expansion the government of the Punjab in collaboration with our long-term business partner for Pakistan, Vertex Medical once more returned to us to review their best options for two new facilities.
Continuing population growth has led to a desperate need for more healthcare facilities. These have in turn led to an increase in the need for sustainable solutions for disposing of hazardous medical and pharmaceutical waste created daily across the province’s hospitals and clinics in many instances in remote and inaccessible locations.
The Punjab is the second largest province in Pakistan and covers an area one and a half times that of England, its population of 127,688,922 is more than double England’s 55,000,000.
As such even with the previous installations in 2018 we still had an awful lot of work to do with Vertex Medical to ensure that the prior barriers to sustainable disposal of medical waste continued to be remedied.
Before our previous installation of 25+ medical incinerators in 2018 the province, much like many rapidly developing countries, was faced with a common problem when disposing of so much waste daily. With the support of Vertex and the commitment of the government, we were able to overcome it.
For this new project, we wanted to ensure that the following issues were not able to return and hinder the success of the waste disposal initiative.
Beginning with a basic lack of infrastructure all health centres and hospitals, especially in more rural areas, need a reliable system to either transport waste to a central facility or manage it on-site. When this is not present, unfortunately, waste could often be discarded on local grounds or end up being burnt in firepits or outdated equipment.
The installation of these 2 C200 high throughput medical incinerators opens up a range of possibilities not just able to safely dispose of all waste created onsite, but they are large enough to be able to also dispose of medical waste from local health centres and clinics ensuring no more waste ends up being a hazard to the community.
Awareness is vital for new installations to succeed operatives and local healthcare workers need to understand the benefits of the new incinerator and the risks with the old methods. As part of every installation, we ensure training is delivered and the results are always compared to previous methods where the cleanliness of our results speaks for themselves turning operatives into advocates.
Additionally, all of our machines in the Punjab have had the added benefit of being installed with a full venturi flu gas scrubbing system which further cleans the gasses created through the process and protects the environment returning only clean and uncontaminated air into the community without smoke and odours as they would have had from open burning.
Not every site relies upon open dumping or burning, developing countries often have outdated incinerators that are operating well past their expiry date and unable to be repaired due to being concrete-based. Addfield incinerators overcome this problem through our triple-lined brick-based refractories which can be easily maintained and if required repaired onsite with our lifetime support and full guidance delivered remotely from our bank of Technical Engineers. This removes the technological obsolescence we have seen before and ensures that waste can be disposed of safely for more than 20 years on each site when adequately maintained.
The solution was simple
Previously we had supplied our MP500 incinerators which were ideal for disposing of the waste created where they were located for this project however, the waste generated was much greater so it was important that we reviewed all options before recommending a machine capable of being continuously loaded throughout the cycle and could dispose of up to 200kg every hour. Once again, these machines were chosen with the addition of our upgraded venturi flu gas scrubbers for environmental sustainability.
We believe that our installations speak for themselves here at Addfield and repeat business is one of the benchmarks that we measure our success on. To once again be in the position to install life-changing incinerators for the government of Punjab with Vertex Medical says all we need to hear about the quality and longevity of our machines as we know that potentially hundreds of tons of medical waste produced in coming years is going to be safely disposed of.