Dive Brief:
- Ingenium — an Escondido, CA environmental services company focused on hazardous waste management — has launched Bio-INergy, which turns red bag medical waste into solid material that is then converted to energy and returned to the electrical grid.
- The process is an alternative to autoclave and landfill treatment, making waste generators unnecessary. Bio-INergy also eliminates the requirement to ship red bag waste out of state for incineration.
- Bio-INergy is among several Ingenium waste-to-energy or recycling programs, such as Ingenium Emerald Energy, which converts non-infectious and non-hazardous materials into energy. Orphan ChemicalSM facilitates transfer of title, then shipment, of surplus chemicals that otherwise would be treated as waste, to new owners.
Dive Insight:
Addressing environmental and social responsibility in general have become priorities across many industries. But these focuses especially make sense in biosciences/medicine — niches that exist to foster health and wellness and that are required to ensure no harm from the hazardous wastes they generate.
While they exist, high-tech medical waste-to-energy systems are not common in the U.S. Bio-INergy is one of the first products of its kind in the state of California.
"With Bio-INergy, [professionals] can significantly reduce landfill contribution and deliver measurable results to benefit their sustainability programs," said Heather Dody, CEO of Ingenium, adding that this recent addition to their platform "demonstrates our drive to provide new ways to make hazardous and other regulated waste sustainable."
