Disposition of medical waste such as, for example, contaminated hypodermic needles and syringes has become a serious problem in recent years. Frequently, such materials are disposed of in the sea and wash ashore, causing health and sanitation authorities to close shore-line areas to access by the public. Thus, there exists a need for a process of disposing of medical waste in a safe and permanent manner which does not result in contamination of the environment into which such waste is disposed. The present invention fulfills such a need.
While it is true that various processes and apparatus have been developed to dispose of various types of waste materials such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,077,901; 4,459,211; 4,459,212; and 4,518,507 which disclose encapsulation of different types of waste materials in various types of resins and solidification of waste materials which are liquid or semiliquid. The prior art disclosures all relate to the chemical bonding or physical bonding of the toxic or contaminated waste with a detoxifying molecular encapsulator. The thus treated materials are then loaded into an encapsulating membrane of water-impermeable polymeric material, they do not solve the problem of the safe disposition of medical wastes, as does the present invention. On the other hand, the present invention, although it is disclosed herein as it applies to medical waste for purposes of simplicity, can also be employed in the disposition of other types of waste material since it does not depend upon molecular, atomic or similar bonding reactions of the toxic particles with the encapsulator.