Incinerator Update

So this week for me has been for the most part a repeat of last week just at a different location. We've spent the past couple of days at Rubaga Hospital, testing a different version of the Mak incinerator. As you may be able to tell from the picture, this version is much bigger than the one tested at Makerere which makes testing a little more challenging. It takes a whole lot more effort to get the bigger incinerator up to the necessary temperatures, but once it gets there, it has a much greater capacity for waste disposal. The tests done at the hospital are carried out under much more realistic conditions as we are actually at a hospital burning their waste. This has caused some problems as well, since the hospital has not done a great job segregating their waste and we'll find things like half full fluid bags in the boxes that say used syringes, and lack of consistency like this makes it really hard to keep the temperature right where we want it. Nicholas says it's not uncommon to find an amputated limb in one of the waste disposal boxes. All things considered, the tests are going well, and we're getting some good results. We're getting better and better at knowing how to best run these incinerators to keep the safe and smokeless. In the picture below, you can see the incinerator, maybe furnace would be more appropriate, that Rubaga Hospital used before the T4T incinerator. Like Nsambya, they were also getting sued by people living nearby because the smoke was just out of control. The Mak incinerator has been an enormous improvement, and there have been no more complaints. I'll probably be at Rubaga for the rest of the week. Hopefully we'll keep having successful tests.

- Stokes