The paper presents and discusses the issues of medical waste (including hazardous ones) and the problems regarding their proper management in Poland. Inappropriate handling of infectious medical waste directly endangers human health and the environment. Infectious waste must be properly disposed of—in practice, the only method of their disposal available in Poland is a thermal treatment in the incinerators tailored for this purpose. This causes many problems to smaller entities such as the local health centers, but also to the beauty and tattoo salons. As a solution to these problems, the mobile medical waste incinerator was proposed. During designing an incinerator unit, a diverse morphological composition of the medical waste should be taken into account, however, there are no inspection reports available in Poland. Based on a few data concerning the composition of the medical waste, the article presents designing considerations in regard to the incinerator’s chamber dimensions. The calculations were carried out for several variants of the waste morphological composition. The own construction of a mobile medical waste incinerator, which conforms to the regulations in Poland and the European Union, was presented. It should be emphasized that it is a novelty on the Polish market, due to the automatic waste feeder into the combustion chamber, adapted to a mobile unit.
A photovoltaic (PV) roof tile serves both as a roofing material and as an electricity-producing surface. The main aim of the present study was to increase the overall system efficiency of PV tiles by using heat recovery. The chosen strategy was two-fold: determine the operational efficiency of PV tiles and optimize construction to increase the cooling effect when using air as the working medium. A detailed experimental study was undertaken to determine these effects. The results indicated that a combined electrical and thermal efficiency of 24% could be reached. This is promising and proves the potential for air to be the working medium in such systems. Moreover, this shows a direction for future system optimization.
The following article presents the current legal situation in Poland as well as in the European Union. Data on biomass production in the Polish South Baltic area were analyzed, along with an indication of the key sectors for the development of bioeconomy. Presentation of the current state of biomass management was made and areas necessary for development were indicated to facilitate the sustainable management of biomass and waste generated during its processing. Differences between regions in the Polish South Baltic Area show how an individual approach in each of these areas is required. During the analysis, the most important barrier to the implementation of the circular economy was distinguished, which is the lack of an appropriate legal framework. This is to be changed by the Circular Economy Road Map, adopted in 2019.
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