## 1 Introduction  
The appropriate management of biomedical waste is extremely important due to its significant environmental and health hazards. Recently, many attempts have been made to better manage the biomedical waste problem. Authorities define biomedical waste as the waste generated during the diagnosis and treatment of people and animals. If not properly handled, biomedical waste poses a great risk of infection through the spread of pathogens from health institutions into the environment [1]. Medical devices are now being manufactured for single use only, thus further increasing the amount of biomedical waste especially in developing countries. This will result in a rapid increase in biomedical waste amounts that should be disposed in a safe manner [2]. In the literature, there are different names for biomedical wastes such as hospital waste, regulated biomedical waste and infectious waste [3,4]. The terms infectious waste and biomedical waste are usually used for wastes that cannot be disposed of in a municipal solid waste landfill due to their pathogenic content. The safe disposal of biomedical wastes is of a great concern for the generators and the public. Different treatment methods can be applied in the treatment of biomedical waste. The main purpose in the treatment of biomedical wastes is to make it safe for human and environmental health. The methods used to make biomedical waste harmless can be grouped as incineration, sterilization, plasma pyrolysis, and microwaving. In the US, about 60% of biomedical waste is incinerated, 37% is sterilized, and the rest is treated by different methods [4]. Within the scope of medical waste statistics, it was reported that 89,545 tons of medical waste was collected from 1550 health institutions operating as of the end of 2018 in Turkey. The amount of medical waste collected in 2018 increased by 4% compared to the previous year. Of this amount, 92.3% of the medical waste collected was sterilized and 7.7% was sent to incineration facilities [5]. Alternative treatment methods to incineration have always been the focus of biomedical waste generators. For example, sterilization or autoclave methods use shredders to reduce the waste volume. Sterilization inactivates microorganisms by using the saturated steam and is commonly used to treat infectious biomedical waste [6; 7]. Thermal processes are applied as low, medium and high temperature depending on the process temperature applied. As a method, the thermal process is applied as the wet (steam) and dry heat treatment. In dry heat treatment, heat is applied to biomedical waste without adding water or steam. Heat is delivered to the waste by conduction, convection or thermal radiation. The processing time and the temperature to be applied depend on the characterization and quantity of the biomedical waste treated. The process temperature to be applied should not be too high to prevent the volatile organic compounds that can be released from the plastic wastes but should be sufficient for the sterilization of waste [6]. The process of sterilization is the treatment of biomedical wastes with steam at high temperature and pressure. If the temperature and contact time are sufficient, this process inactivates many types of microorganisms. Biomedical waste containers are placed in a closed chamber and sterilized with steam for a certain time at the required pressure and temperature. As a general practice, biomedical waste is steamed at 121 \({}^{\circ}\)C for 30 min at 2 bar and approximately 99.99 percent of microorganisms are inactivated by this process [8; 9; 10]. Biomedical wastes can be landfilled together with municipal solid wastes after steam treatment and size reduction. Sterilization is the process of completely destroying all kinds of microbial life, including bacterial spores in biomedical wastes, by physical, chemical, and mechanical methods, or reducing the level of these microorganisms by 99.9999% (6 log\({}_{10}\) reduction).