Field Medical Waste Incinerators
Sharps, dressings, pathological waste and contaminated PPE from aid posts cleared where no clinical collection exists.
An aid post generates clinical waste in a place with no clinical waste contract. Sharps, dressings, giving sets and contaminated PPE cannot wait for a collection that is not coming, and they cannot go into the general stream. A dual-chamber unit clears them at the same condition a hospital incinerator works to.
Three Models,
One Solution
The compact AmoBurn: 150 kg per charge at 1.8 t, light enough to be relocated between sites. Used where destruction has to be witnessed and certified on site rather than handed to a third-party contractor.
250 kg per charge for established base infrastructure. The two-burner arrangement and 1250 mm chamber handle classified document destruction and ammunition-adjacent waste in the same unit.
The largest AmoBurn at 300 kg per charge. Specified where the secure-destruction requirement is continuous enough that a smaller unit would need several cycles a day to keep up.
Which Model
Fits Your Volume
Pick a model to see what it clears in a day of field medical & aid post waste.
An aid post or Role 1 facility: sharps bins and dressings are charged closed, and one cycle clears a training area's clinical arisings for the week.
Clinical waste in the permit
The permit application must name clinical waste explicitly, including sharps and pathological waste, with the relevant waste codes. A permit written for general waste does not silently cover the aid post.
850°C, two seconds — as standard
This is the regulated condition for clinical waste incineration and the units meet it as built. Where the charge is plastics-heavy enough to exceed 1% halogenated content, the secondary-chamber minimum rises to 1,100°C.
Segregation stays a clinical duty
Cytotoxic and cytostatic waste, medicinal returns and gas cylinders each have their own route. On-site incineration removes the collection dependency, not the classification discipline that precedes it.
Records
Cycles map onto the clinical waste log the same way they map onto a destruction register: one charge, one entry, with ash leaving under an ordinary transfer note.
Why Burn It
On Site
4 things change on the day this stream stops leaving the site.
No clinical collection to depend on
A training area or deployed camp has no yellow-bag round. Waiting for one means storing infectious material in a place designed for neither the volume nor the duration, and accepting a hazard that grows every day the collection does not arrive.
The sharps bin goes in whole
Sharps are destroyed inside their container, so nobody handles the contents at the disposal stage. The most exposed step in clinical waste handling — decanting — is removed entirely rather than made safer.
Same condition as a hospital route
850°C held for two seconds is the regulated condition for clinical waste incineration. A field unit meeting it is not a field compromise; it is the same destruction standard delivered where the patient actually is.
Ash is ordinary waste
Residue is 3–5% mineral ash carrying nothing infectious. It leaves under a normal transfer note instead of a licensed clinical waste carrier, which is the entire logistics chain a remote site does not have.
Dual-chamber unit
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary chamber holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds — the Industrial Emissions Directive condition, met as built rather than as an option.
Burner set and fuel train
Configured for natural gas, LPG, diesel, biofuel or hydrogen. Fuel choice is a site decision; the combustion condition is identical whichever is specified.
What Ships
With The Unit
Identical whichever stream it is specified for. The operating procedure changes; the machine does not.
Dual-chamber unit
Primary chamber running 850–1,200°C with a secondary chamber holding flue gas above 850°C for two seconds — the Industrial Emissions Directive condition, met as built rather than as an option.
Burner set and fuel train
Configured for natural gas, LPG, diesel, biofuel or hydrogen. Fuel choice is a site decision; the combustion condition is identical whichever is specified.
IP6X control panel
PLC control with cycle logging, chamber thermocouples and interlocked charge door. The cycle record is what a destruction register entry is written against.
Coretex refractory lining
Monolithic castable lining rated for the full temperature range, replaceable in service rather than requiring the shell to be scrapped with it.
Stack and dispersion data pack
Stack supplied to the height your site-specific dispersion assessment calls for, with the emissions data the permit application has to reference.
Commissioning and operator training
On-site commissioning, a witnessed first burn, and training for the establishment personnel who will hold the charge-door key.
How One Burn Runs,
Start To Finish
One charge is one countable event. That is what makes a batch unit auditable and a continuous one not.
One Cycle,
Start To Finish
Adds clinical segregation at the aid post and clinical waste codes — including sharps and pathological waste — named explicitly in the permit. Bins are charged closed, so nothing is decanted.
Clinical waste is bagged and sharps binned at source exactly as in a fixed facility. The incinerator changes the endpoint, not the segregation discipline that feeds it.
Sharps bins and clinical bags are loaded closed. Nothing is decanted, so the handling step that causes sharps injuries at disposal does not exist in the cycle.
Primary combustion destroys dressings, plastics and pathological waste; the secondary chamber holds gas above 850°C for two seconds. Where the charge is plastics-heavy enough to pass 1% halogenated content, the condition rises to 1,100°C.
Standard interlocked cool-down. Clinical charges are usually well under capacity, so cycles are shorter than a full 300 kg burn — size on frequency, not on hitting the rated load.
Residue is 3–5% mineral ash with the inert metal fraction of sharps. It leaves as ordinary waste under a transfer note, and the cycle is recorded against the clinical waste log.
What You Can Burn —
And What You Can't
One charge takes the whole stream without pre-sorting. What must never enter it is a short, hard list.
Yes: accepted in a charge
No pre-sorting between these
- Sharps bins, charged closedBins go into the chamber sealed and unopened, so nobody handles the contents at the point of disposal. That is the whole safety case for this stream.
- Contaminated dressings and wound wasteDressings, swabs and wound packing from the treatment bay, together with field-expedient treatment consumables.
- Giving sets, cannulae and tubingLines, cannulae, tubing and drainage bags, charged with their fluid residue still in them rather than emptied first.
- Pathological waste within the permitted scopeAccepted at the same 850°C two-second condition as the rest of the charge, provided the stream is named in the permit.
- Contaminated PPE and disposable linenGloves, aprons and disposable PPE, plus contaminated bedding and linen cleared from the treatment area.
- Expired consumables and their packagingSingle-use items past their date and the sterile packaging around them, where no return route exists on a deployed site.
No: never charged
Not a permit question — these stay out
- Cytotoxic and cytostatic medicinesA separate waste classification with its own disposal route and permit conditions. Declare it and route it properly rather than assuming the stream covers it.
- Pressurised medical gas cylindersSealed vessels under heat. Cylinders go back through the gas chain, whatever their state.
- Batteries from monitors and powered kitThermal runaway plus ash contamination. WEEE route.
- Bulk liquid chemicals and fixativesA batch chamber is not a liquid injection plant. Absorbed onto absorbent, declared in the permit, is the acceptable form.
Can you legally burn field medical & aid post 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 size incinerator for 120 kg of clinical waste a week?
Arithmetic on published model figures, not a customer reference. Your numbers go through the same steps.
How This
Was Worked Out
≈120 kg of clinical arisings a week against the AMBI-150's 150 kg rating = one part-loaded cycle a week, leaving 4–6 kg of ash at 3–5% and no licensed clinical carrier movement to book. Clinical charges rarely fill a chamber: specify on cycle frequency and storage time, not on hitting the rated load.
None — bins charged closed
4–6 kg per week
0
1.8 t — relocatable
Send your daily or weekly arisings and we will confirm the model, the charge count and the permit route.
Related Products
& Services
Complementary equipment and engineering services for your process.
Field medical & aid post waste Questions
Answered against the published figures for the models specified for this stream, not a generic range sheet.
A field medical waste incinerator is a batch dual-chamber unit used to destroy clinical waste at the point it is generated, on sites where the commercial clinical waste chain does not reach. In defence use that means Role 1 facilities, aid posts, exercise medical cover and training-area treatment points — anywhere a clinician is working without a scheduled yellow-bag collection behind them. The combustion requirement for clinical waste is the one the Industrial Emissions Directive already sets: flue gas above 850°C for two seconds in a secondary chamber, with the primary chamber between 850°C and 1,200°C. That condition is what makes sharps, dressings, pathological waste and contaminated PPE safe to handle as ash rather than as infectious material, and it is met as standard rather than as an upgrade. Sharps are the stream that decides the argument. A sharps bin has no safe interim state: it is either in a controlled chain or it is a hazard sitting in a store. Batch incineration turns a full bin into a countable disposal event on the day it fills, with the bin itself going into the charge rather than being emptied. What comes out is 3–5% mineral ash plus the inert fraction of any metal. Nothing in the residue is infectious, and it leaves the site as ordinary waste under a transfer note rather than as clinical waste requiring a licensed carrier.
≈120 kg of clinical arisings a week against the AMBI-150's 150 kg rating = one part-loaded cycle a week, leaving 4–6 kg of ash at 3–5% and no licensed clinical carrier movement to book. Clinical charges rarely fill a chamber: specify on cycle frequency and storage time, not on hitting the rated load.
Yes, and that is the point. Sharps bins are charged closed and unopened, so the disposal stage involves no decanting and no contact with the contents. The metal fraction is recovered from the ash as inert scrap; everything else leaves as mineral ash.
No. Clinical waste incineration is regulated at 850°C with two-second secondary-chamber retention, which is the standard condition these units are built to. What differs is the permit: clinical waste, sharps and pathological waste have to be named explicitly in the application.
Within the scope written into the permit, yes — the combustion condition is the same one a fixed clinical incinerator works to. The classification and the permitted waste codes are the constraint, not the machine, so agree the scope with the regulator at application stage.
They are a separate waste classification with their own disposal route and their own permit conditions, and they should not be assumed into a general clinical charge. Segregate them at the aid post and route them accordingly.
No. Residue is 3–5% mineral ash carrying nothing infectious, and it leaves the site as ordinary waste under a transfer note rather than requiring a licensed clinical waste carrier. Removing that carrier dependency is usually the reason a remote site specifies a unit at all.
The AMBI-150 in almost every case. Clinical arisings rarely fill a 300 kg chamber, so the sizing question is how long waste would otherwise sit in storage between cycles, not how close a charge gets to the rated load. The AMBI-150 is also the lightest at 1.8 tonnes, which matters where the facility moves.
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.
- No clinical collection to depend on
- The sharps bin goes in whole
- Same condition as a hospital route
- Ash is ordinary waste