In the midst of this pandemic, the critical shortage of personal protective equipment has become a major problem.

The province is looking at ways to deal with the issue — for instance, getting local companies to manufacture them. But what about decontaminating them so they can be used again? North Bay's NorEnvironmental International is offering to establish a decontamination processing centre in the city.

"The plan is to provide all hospitals in Ontario with the capacity to sterilize and clean about 100,000 pieces of personal protective equipment per day," said Marc Udeschini, company president.

"That includes the N95 masks, surgical masks, face shields and other personal protective equipment."

The equipment will be processed at what Udeschini calls "a regional center" in North Bay. The hospitals ship their used PPE to the centre, where it will be cleaned, sterilized and returned back to them.

The decontamination process uses hydrogen peroxide "under an approved process by the FDA in the US," he said, noting that hydrogen peroxide is a standard disinfectant used in medical facilities. Each item will be lab-tested to ensure that it has been through the complete process.

Udeschini said the PPE can be decontaminated up to 10 times.

In talks with hospitals, government officials

The company has been doing decontamination for hospitals in the States for about two decades, he said. And they have developed a process and training procedures to decontaminate personnel in the event of a chemical spill or where civilians are contaminated.

"It's a retool to the extent that we are doing something that we've never done before under an approved process," Udeschini said. "But the methodologies are very similar."

Company officials are "in discussion" with the regional hospital in North Bay, and they've alerted the provincial government through North Bay-Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli "that the process is available."

"We're just in the beginning stages of introducing the idea that a capacity does exist to decontaminate PPE and how much could this conceivably help the shortage," Udeschini said.

With a global scramble underway to obtain personal protective equipment, Udeschini said NorEnvironmental's offer to provide a backup plan may provide some degree of certainty that hospitals will have clean, safe PPE available for frontline workers.

"There is a discussion underway, right now, at both the regional and national level about the potential for decontaminating face masks and PPE in general," he said.