Stericycle’s Northern Nevada facility.
Courtesy
Jim Ferguson, senior vice president of engineering with Stericycle of Bannockburn, Ill., said the company’s new hospital, medical and infectious waste incineration facility at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center is the 35-year-old company’s flagship incineration operations.
Stericycle last week hosted a ribbon-cutting at the 110,000-square-foot facility, which cost nearly $110 million to construct and equip. Stericycle will spend the remainder of this year and much of the next testing and refining the incineration and emissions-reclamation systems before coming fully online in the fourth quarter of 2025, Ferguson said.
Because the technology is so cutting edge, the true engineering challenge lay not only in perfecting it but implementing it as well.
“With the amount of technology that’s in there, it’s like no other incinerator in the country,” Ferguson said. “This state-of-the-art facility has taken the best technology we have, along with our third-party business partners, to improve on how we operate and how to do it better.
“It’s one thing to have it laid out on a drawing board,” Ferguson added. “Now that we have the pride of the fleet here, we have to go in and test the equipment to make sure it runs the way we think it will. The redundancies that we have built into this system is really what makes it our safest plant as well.”
The facility leverages and improves on decades of experience and will serve as a blueprint for future operations, Stericycle President and Chief Executive Officer Cindy J. Miller said in a statement. Testing — and retesting — operations at the new facility is of utmost importance, Ferguson added.
“There are several sub-processes, and each one of those systems will be tested individually. Then we have to connect everything, put gas through it, and test all that. Only after everything checks out, and we are getting the right readings, and all the communications are working, and all the safety systems have been checked, will we have the confidence that we are successful and we can introduce waste.
Once waste is introduced, all those systems will be retested, Ferguson added. Once fully operational, Stericycle Northern Nevada will be a 24/7 operation. In 2023, Stericycle said it treated 1.3 billion pounds of medical waste.
The highly secure facility serves as a central incineration location for medical, infectious and hospital waste that’s processed at other Stericycle facilities before being sent to Northern Nevada. Ferguson told NNBW that hospital systems across the country produce tens of millions of pounds of waste, with about six to eight percent of that waste classified as regulated medical waste.
Of that six to eight percent, 10 percent is deemed incendiary waste, such as pathological waste, materials used in chemotherapy treatments, and unwanted and unused medications and pharmaceuticals.
Any waste opioids and controlled substances that enter the facility are sent directly to a secured vault. When it’s ready to be incinerated, it travels along a completely caged-in conveyor belt to the kilns.
“It’s very highly controlled,” Ferguson said.
The nearest Stericycle facility is in Stockton. Like many other Stericycle processing facilities, the Stockton operation treats the majority of intake waste in an autoclave, which renders it non-infectious so it can be safely disposed of. Containerized specialty medical waste, however, will be consolidated and sent to the Northern Nevada facility for incineration.
The Northern Nevada facility operates under strict state and federal emission standards for hospital, medical and infectious waste incineration. Those standards are far more strict than regulations imposed on other types of incineration facilities, Ferguson noted.
The facility is an engineering marvel that took more than 120,000 construction-labor hours to complete. It contains more than 800 miles of electrical cabling, 20,000 linear feet of piping, and 2.2 million pounds of industrial equipment.
The heart of Stericycle Northern Nevada are two giant rotary incinerators that operate at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. The kilns spin a full rotation every three minutes, with new waste material entering every six minutes. The rotary action works much like the mixer on a cement truck and continually sifts the ash, leading to a much more efficient burn, Ferguson said.
“With a typical incinerator, 1,000 pounds of waste burns down to about 70 percent — about 30 percent of that material is leftover as ash,” he said. “With our rotary kilns, that waste will burn down to almost 10 percent, and it’s much finer ash.”
The kilns may be the heart of the operation, but the expansive emissions control systems that treat air coming from the kilns is its backbone.
“That is the tough part of it,” Ferguson said. “A lot of our systems happen after the burn. They clean the air by pulling all the pollutants like sulfur and mercury out of that air. When the emissions are finally released back into the air, all it will be is steam, and it will perform better than the stringent emissions standards for new hospital medical infectious waste incinerators.”
The facility employs a plant process water reuse system that uses reclaimed water, and its power system has redundancies as well in the form of backup batteries that will power the backup systems and a generator that will power the entire facility and keep processes running in the event of a power outage.
“We have these incinerators burning, and the last thing we want is to have them in check,” Ferguson said. “If power is lost, the generator turns on in eight to 10 seconds, and the whole system refires.
“We have zero discharge of industrial water,” he added. “We keep it all here and recycle it in a closed-loop system.
The facility also recaptures heat from the kilns and runs it through a boiler to create steam energy to heat hot water for its dual wash facilities: One for smaller reusable bins and one for larger reusable bins.
Stericycle currently employs 50, though employment in Northern Nevada is expected to spike to 80.
The building shell was constructed by Arco Murray, which broke ground in February 2022. El Dorado Engineering of West Jordan, Utah, handled equipment design and construction.
Ferguson said Storey County and Tahoe Reno Industrial Center were a great location for Stericycle Northern Nevada from both a land-use and permitting perspective.
“The permitting process everywhere is challenging and involves many things, from a conditional use permit right up to a building permit,” he said. “It’s about having the county, state and federal government aligned and working together in Storey County. All those things played together to help get permits approved faster.
“Nevada has a business-friendly environment, and here at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center there are similar businesses in heavy industry, which made Storey County the perfect location.”