Enhanced, Unique Microwave Methodologies for Remediation of CW and BW Agents and Medical Waste

"In a collaborative effort with one of the pre-eminent microwave chemistry research groups in this country, this project offers novel and simple approaches to kg-scale microwave remediation of three types of hazardous wastes: Chemical warfare (CW) agents;Biological warfare (BW) agents; and infectious medical waste. The unique microwave methodologies to be applied include: For CW agents, unique hydrolysis and heterogenous oxidation methodologies developed in our labs and demonstrated successfully with avariety of relevant organic substrates; for BW agents, unique remediation procedures demonstrated in our labs very recently for anthrax-like bacteria and related methodologies; for infectious medical waste, an array of a combination of methods demonstratedin our labs and more effective than extant shred-steam-and-microwave methods; and for all three waste types, an additional array methods selected from microwave-induced organic reaction enhancement (MORE) techniques pioneered and refined in our labs andespecially apt for the targeted remediations. The Phase I work will demonstrate the viability of the techniques for each of the above three waste types, scale up to a medium (100 g) scale, and select the microwave configuration and equipment to be used forfurther studies. If proven successful, due to substantial cost savings, a major section of the hospital waste disposal market would be driven to the new technology, a substantial market