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Abstract
This work presents the health-care waste (HCW) management and an approach to assess and identify polymers in a General Surgery Unit - Internment Service (GSU) of a Brazilian university hospital, to estimate the main polymers presenting in medical devices that are consumed during a year, discarded either as infecting (Group A) or as scarifying residue (Group E). Among the waste produced from the medical devices, 3.14 ton (98.79%) were composed of polymers (63.06% of plastics and 35.73% elastomers) while around 0.03 ton (1.21%) by metals. The proposed approach is composed of 4 steps: (1) Collecting data about consumed medical devices to be categorized into the residues Groups (A and E); (2) Identifying the polymeric composition with information provided by suppliers; (3) Characterizing the polymer functional groups by Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and (4) Determining the polymer melting point by Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC). According to the results, the analyzed HCW was composed mainly of polypropylene (80.88%), high-density polyethylene (5.28%), polystyrene (4.51%), and cellulose (3.58%), from a total of 11 different polymers.