An eco-friendly solution to workplace infection risk durng the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the globe in 2020, with a disproportional effect on the working class: healthcare workers, emergency services personnel (police, fire), workers in homes for the aged, childcare workers, cleaners, workers in the hospitality industry, public transport, and taxi drivers, workers in retail sectors and shopping malls are all at increased risk of exposure from interactions with the public. The US Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has (OSHA) mandated using personal protective equipment (PPE) for all workers, most of which is single-use and disposable. A recent review of PPE medical waste during the pandemic reports an increase from 40 tons/day to 240 tons/day in China, a 350% increase (with an added 925 t/month) in Spain, and a two-fold increase in India (including an additional 11.4 tons of hazardous waste from households). These volumes of contaminated waste have exceeded the capacity of waste management systems in many countries, resulting in improper disposal of used PPE with infectious potential and pollution of the environment with microplastics. Consequently, a secondary environmental crisis now looms due to an estimated 129 billion discarded facemasks/month. A decentralized solution to effectively sanitize used PPE for re-use is essential for an environmentally sound long-term response to infection risk in the workplace. Fathhome has developed a waterless ozone-based device to sanitize items quickly and efficiently in the workplace. Our technology was able to reduce SARS-CoV-2 infectious particle counts to levels >7 log-fold lower than experimental controls with a 20-minute sanitization cycle in proof-of-concept experiments. Similarly, viable Escherichia coli on fabric was reduced by >99% in our device. To advance towards market readiness, our overall goal for this project is to tune further our device's microbicidal effects against SARS-CoV-2 and bacterial pathogens (Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and ensure overall safe emissions for indoor use. We will briefly expose SARS-CoV-2 and bacterial pathogens spotted onto masks and face shield material to a single sanitization cycle and enumerate surviving organisms. Our device operates under proprietary vacuum-based technology to ensure ozone emissions are contained and uses a catalytic ozone scrubber to converter O3 to O2 at the end of the cycle. However, ozone is toxic to humans at microbiocidal concentrations. This application's main effort will be concentrated on engineering and implementing ozone emission safeguards (including robust testing of our catalytic converter) to ensure safe device operation. In the past 25 years, 15 major global outbreaks of airborne infectious diseases have occurred, and this will not be the last pandemic to threaten the American worker. Implementing technologies like Fathhome's ozone-based system in workplaces now will allow the safe re-use of PPE in the case of future pandemics, balancing the need for safety and environmental sustainability.