Sharps Waste Incinerators
Sealed UN3291 containers charged whole — needles, blades, cannulae and lancets, never decanted.
A sharps bin is designed never to be opened again once it is closed. Everything downstream of that lid — the store, the vehicle, the transfer station — is a handling risk the container is holding at bay. On-site incineration takes those steps out entirely: the sealed bin goes from the ward to the charge door, and what comes back is inert metal in ash.
Four Models,
One Solution
The entry point to the LitBurn range. A 3.3 m³ primary chamber and three burners give continuous 125 kg/h destruction in a footprint that fits a standard yard bay, which makes it the usual choice for a single-site operator replacing skip hire rather than a multi-site waste contract.
The most specified unit in the range. Chamber volume rises to 5.5 m³ for 250 kg/h continuous throughput while the external width grows by only 230 mm over the LBI-125, so sites that outgrow the smallest unit rarely have to rework the slab or the building line.
A 9.6 m³ chamber — nearly double the LBI-250 — for medium-scale industrial waste destruction. At this size most operators pair the unit with heat recovery, because the thermal output during a full shift is large enough to displace a dedicated water heater.
The largest LitBurn: a 16.2 m³ chamber running 500 kg/h continuously. Specified where waste arrives faster than a batch unit can clear it — large manufacturing sites, industrial estates, and operators consolidating several smaller waste contracts onto one machine.
Which Model
Fits Your Volume
Pick a model to see what it clears in a day of sharps & needle waste.
A hospital, clinic group or community trust clearing a week of filled containers in a single short run.
18 01 01 or 18 01 03* depending on contamination
Sharps not contaminated with medicines or infectious material code as 18 01 01; infectious sharps are 18 01 03*, hazardous. Medicinally contaminated sharps carry 18 01 09 alongside. Whichever you produce, they have to be named at permit application.
The Sharps Regulations sit upstream of the unit
The Health and Safety (Sharps Instruments in Healthcare) Regulations 2013 govern safe devices, container placement and injury reporting at the point of use. Destruction on site is the end of the route, not a substitute for any of it.
UN3291 containers, charged sealed
Containers must be approved, correctly assembled, filled to the line and locked. Charging them closed is the operating rule for this stream — a decant step would put the one risk the container exists to control back into your own yard.
The residue includes metal
Ash from a sharps run carries an inert metal fraction with no recoverable form. It leaves under a transfer note like the rest of the residue, and the duty of care on it is yours until it reaches a permitted destination.
Why Burn It
On Site
4 things change on the day this stream stops leaving the site.
The container is never reopened
Every step a sealed sharps bin takes is a step where it can be dropped, crushed or over-filled. Destroying it where it was filled deletes the transport, the transfer station and the third-party handling — the container's job ends at the charge door.
Full bins stop accumulating in the store
Sharps containers are sized for a fill window, not for storage. Where collections are weekly and use is heavy, the store fills with closed bins waiting for a vehicle. On-site destruction turns a week of filled containers into a short run.
The metal leaves as inert residue
Needles, blades and tips come out of the chamber as sterile inert metal in the ash, with no recoverable form and nothing that can be reused. That is a stronger end state than a container being tipped into a shredder somewhere you cannot see.
Community and outreach bins get a route
District nursing, phlebotomy rounds, vaccination clinics and needle exchange all return small containers that are awkward to consolidate for collection. A destination on your own site makes the return leg the whole disposal route.
Dual-chamber unit, 1,100°C capable
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary chamber holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds. Clinical charges are PVC-rich — IV bags, giving sets, suction tubing, sterile packaging — so where the stream carries more than 1% halogenated organic content the secondary minimum rises to 1,100°C, and the unit holds it as built rather than as an upgrade.
Front dual-door loading
The LBI range is charged through a front dual door at floor level. Wheeled 770-litre clinical carts, rigid-bodied sharps bins and red-lidded anatomical containers go in at the height they arrive at, which is what keeps the last handling step in a clinical waste route a push rather than a lift over a rim.
What Ships
With The Unit
Identical whichever stream it is specified for. The operating procedure changes; the machine does not.
Dual-chamber unit, 1,100°C capable
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary chamber holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds. Clinical charges are PVC-rich — IV bags, giving sets, suction tubing, sterile packaging — so where the stream carries more than 1% halogenated organic content the secondary minimum rises to 1,100°C, and the unit holds it as built rather than as an upgrade.
Front dual-door loading
The LBI range is charged through a front dual door at floor level. Wheeled 770-litre clinical carts, rigid-bodied sharps bins and red-lidded anatomical containers go in at the height they arrive at, which is what keeps the last handling step in a clinical waste route a push rather than a lift over a rim.
IP6X control panel with cycle logging
PLC control with chamber thermocouples, interlocked charge door and a time-stamped temperature record per run. For clinical waste that record is what turns a claim of destruction into evidence of it — the condition an infection control audit or a permit compliance check asks to see.
Burner set and fuel train
Configured for natural gas, LPG, diesel, biofuel or hydrogen, with three burners across the LBI range. Fuel choice is a site decision; the combustion condition is identical whichever is specified. Wet loads — anatomical waste, suction liners, fluid-heavy dressings — draw more burner time, not a different machine.
Coretex refractory lining
Monolithic castable lining rated for the full temperature range and for sustained running at the top of it. Replaceable in service rather than requiring the shell to be scrapped with it, which matters on a unit running shifts against a daily arisings curve rather than single burns.
Stack, dispersion data and commissioning
Stack supplied to the height your site-specific dispersion assessment calls for — hospital sites usually carry the tightest one on this list, with wards, intakes and neighbours all inside the assessment — plus the emissions data pack the permit application references, on-site commissioning, a witnessed first run and operator training.
How One Burn Runs,
Start To Finish
One run is one countable event, reconciled against a manifest and evidenced by a time-stamped temperature log.
One Cycle,
Start To Finish
Adds 18 01 01 and 18 01 03* to the permit depending on contamination, and one rule that overrides convenience: containers are charged closed. Medicinally contaminated and cytotoxic sharps are separate streams and stay separate.
Containers are filled to the marked line — not past it — and the lid is locked closed at the point of use. Under the Sharps Regulations 2013 that is where the control sits, and nothing about an on-site unit changes it.
Closed containers are labelled with the ward or round they came from and held in the clinical waste store. The label survives to the run record, which is what ties a destroyed container back to where it was filled.
Bins go through the front dual door sealed, at floor level, from the cart or trolley they arrived on. There is no decant step, no inspection step, and no point in the route where a filled container is opened.
The container body and its contents are destroyed in the primary chamber with the gases held above 850°C for two seconds in the secondary. Plastic and organic contamination burn out; the steel does not.
Residue comes out as mineral ash plus inert metal — needles and blades with no recoverable form. The run log and the container count close the record for the batch of bins that went in.
What You Can Burn —
And What You Can't
One run takes the whole stream without pre-sorting. What must never enter it is a short, hard list.
Yes: accepted in a run
No pre-sorting between these
- Needles, syringes and cannulae in sealed containersHypodermic needles, needle-and-syringe assemblies, winged sets and cannulae in UN3291-approved rigid containers, charged closed exactly as they left the ward.
- Blades and surgical sharpsScalpel blades, suture needles, trocars, biopsy needles and disposable instrument tips from theatre, clinic and minor procedure rooms.
- Lancets and monitoring sharpsFinger-prick lancets, glucose monitoring sharps and pen needles from diabetic care, ward rounds and community nursing.
- Broken glass and ampoules from clinical useGlass ampoules, vials and slides collected in the sharps container rather than in a bag — the glass fraction reports to the ash as inert residue.
- Community and outreach containersSmall-volume containers returned from district nursing, phlebotomy, vaccination clinics and needle exchange, consolidated for destruction on your own site.
- Dental and podiatry sharpsLocal anaesthetic cartridges and needles, endodontic files and scalpel blades from practices within the group — provided nothing amalgam-bearing is in the container.
No: never charged
Not a permit question — these stay out
- Cytotoxic and cytostatic sharpsPurple-lidded containers are hazardous under 18 01 08* with their own permitted scope. They are specified on the pharmaceutical sector; they do not ride along in a general sharps run.
- Containers filled past the lineAn over-filled bin cannot be locked properly and is the classic injury at the charge door. It is a rejection at the store, not a problem to be solved at the door.
- Loose sharps in bagsA sharps item in a soft bag defeats the entire control. It goes into a rigid container first, wherever it was found — the bag is not a route to the charge door.
- Amalgam-bearing dental sharpsAnything carrying dental amalgam is 18 01 10* hazardous mercury waste and must go to licensed recovery. Heat volatilises mercury, which is exactly what an amalgam separator exists to prevent.
Can you legally burn sharps & needle waste on site?
Technically, yes: the chamber destroys almost everything on the accepted list at 850–1,200°C, and capability is rarely the constraint. Legally is a separate question. What your site is allowed to burn is set by your environmental permit from the Environment Agency, SEPA or NIEA and the waste codes written into it. The never-charged list is different again: those materials are out of scope for the unit or governed by a direction, and no permit wording brings them back in. Send us the codes you hold, or the ones you expect to apply for, and we will tell you which of this list they cover before anything is specified.
Send us your waste codesWhat does it take to destroy 600 kg of filled sharps containers a week?
Arithmetic on published model figures, not a customer reference. Your numbers go through the same steps.
How This
Was Worked Out
600 kg a week against the LBI-125's 125 kg/h = about 5 hours of running, leaving roughly 30 kg of residue at the top of the 3–5% band because the steel fraction survives as inert metal. Sharps runs denser than the rest of the clinical stream, so the weight rating rather than the chamber volume decides here — the opposite of bagged infectious waste. Where both streams share a unit, size on the bagged waste and the sharps will fit.
≈30 kg a week
0
3.3 m³
2.5 t
Send your daily or weekly arisings and we will confirm the model, the run time and the permit route.
Related Products
& Services
Complementary equipment and engineering services for your process.
Sharps & needle waste Questions
Answered against the published figures for the models specified for this stream, not a generic range sheet.
Sharps waste is needles, syringes with needles attached, cannulae, scalpel blades, lancets, suture needles, broken glass ampoules and anything else that can puncture skin. Under HTM 07-01 it is collected in rigid UN3291-approved containers colour-coded by contamination: orange lid for sharps not contaminated with medicines, yellow lid where medicines are involved, purple lid for cytotoxic and cytostatic contamination. A sharps incinerator is not a different machine — it is a permitted clinical waste unit operated under a rule that never bends: the container is charged sealed. Nothing is decanted, tipped, compacted or opened for inspection. The needlestick risk in a sharps route sits almost entirely in the handling steps between the ward and the destruction point, and destroying the container on site removes most of them by removing the journey. The combustion condition is the same 850–1,200°C primary and two-second secondary retention above 850°C, rising to 1,100°C where the charge carries more than 1% halogenated organic content — the rigid containers themselves are usually polypropylene, but the sharps stream rarely travels alone in a run. What separates this stream from every other one on the site is the residue. The plastic body burns away and the steel does not: needles, blades and instrument tips report to the ash as inert metal, sterile and unrecognisable, recovered with the ash rather than as a separate fraction to be handled.
600 kg a week against the LBI-125's 125 kg/h = about 5 hours of running, leaving roughly 30 kg of residue at the top of the 3–5% band because the steel fraction survives as inert metal. Sharps runs denser than the rest of the clinical stream, so the weight rating rather than the chamber volume decides here — the opposite of bagged infectious waste. Where both streams share a unit, size on the bagged waste and the sharps will fit.
Always. The lid is locked at the point of use and never reopened — the container goes through the front dual door exactly as it left the ward. Decanting would put the needlestick risk the container was designed to eliminate back into your own building, which would make the unit worse than a collection.
They come out with the ash as inert metal: sterile, deformed and with no recoverable form. The plastic body of the container burns away, the organic contamination is destroyed at 850°C for two seconds, and the steel fraction reports to the residue and leaves under a transfer note with it.
No. Purple-lidded cytotoxic and cytostatic sharps are hazardous under 18 01 08* and need their own permitted scope, their own segregation and — usually — the 1,100°C condition declared. They are specified in full on the pharmaceutical sector rather than folded in here.
Not at all. Safer devices, container placement, filling to the line and injury reporting are all point-of-use controls under the 2013 Regulations. What changes downstream is that the sealed container stops travelling — the risk that is removed is the transport and handling one, not the clinical one.
Weigh rather than count: filled containers vary from a couple of kilograms to well over ten. At 125 kg/h an LBI-125 clears roughly 600 kg — a typical hospital week — in about five hours. Sharps is dense compared with bagged waste, so the rating rather than the chamber volume is the number that governs.
Yes, provided nothing amalgam-bearing is in the container. Local anaesthetic cartridges, needles, endodontic files and blades are fine; amalgam waste and teeth with amalgam fillings are 18 01 10* mercury waste and must go to licensed recovery instead. The dental stream is set out in full on its own page.
Ready to
Incinerate?
Send the stream, the volume and the site constraints. We will confirm the model, the permit route, and what the specification has to say to satisfy the regulator.
- The container is never reopened
- Full bins stop accumulating in the store
- The metal leaves as inert residue
- Community and outreach bins get a route