Environmental and Economic Assessments of Industry-Level Medical Waste Disposal Technologies - a Case Study of Ten Chinese Megacities

Medical waste (MW) has explosively increased due to the COVID-19 epidemic, and an economical-affordable and environmentally friendly MW disposal technology is required. Previous studies primarily focused on individual MW disposal plants, which may lead to potentially biased results. In this study, major MW disposal technologies in China, i.e., incineration technologies (pyrolysis incineration and rotary kiln incineration), and sterilization technologies (steam sterilization, microwave sterilization, and chemical disinfection) with residue landfill or incineration were analyzed via life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC) and net present value (NPV) methods. Life cycle inventories and economic cost data for 4–5 typical companies were selected and averaged for each technology from 128 sources, to reflect industry levels. LCA and LCC results indicate that the environmental impacts of microwave and chemical disinfection with residue incineration for electricity generation are superior to the other technologies, and the economic benefit of steam sterilization is the highest, while rotary kiln incineration is the lowest. NPV analysis demonstrates that steam sterilization with residue incineration is optimal, breaking even in the first year, while pyrolysis and rotary kiln incineration break even until the 4th to 5th year. Moreover, the 10 cities with the largest MW production from 2019 to 2020 are analyzed. Greenhouse gas emissions from the MW disposal in ten cities in 2020 increased by 7% over 2019 to 43,800 tons and eight other environmental pollutants increased by 6% to 11%. Economically, Hangzhou and Shanghai exhibit the highest cost-effectiveness, while Nanjing and Shenzhen deliver the lowest.