Picture of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at Battelle CCDS Critical Care Decontamination System™

New technology will allow California to sterilize and reuse N95 masks

Posted by Donald Judd on Apr 8, 2020

Columbus, Ohio (April 8, 2020)—California will utilize new technology from the company Battelle that allows for the sterilization and reuse of N95 masks as early as this week, Mark Ghilarducci, with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, announced today.

“It's a technology that is designed to get on the ground, and actually bring in a used N95 mask and do a sterilization and cleaning process that makes them basically new again,” Ghilarducci told reporters Wednesday. “And this is new technology that has that has been certified by the FDA, and CDC, and it will be here in California, here within the next week. As capability, we’ll have the ability to clean up to 80,000 masks per day.”

CNN's Julia Chatterley interviewed Battelle’s CEO, Lewis Von Thaer, Wednesday morning, who said that using hydrogen peroxide in vaporized form, “we proved that we could reuse these masks, basically decontaminate them for reuse up to 20 times with no degradation.”

Read the full article here.