Medical waste is also a type of waste material
Experts believe that around 15% of discarded medical waste can endanger human health. These are infectious waste from the laboratory, disposable material (contaminated with the patient’s blood), needles, lancets, masks, scalpels, drugs (returned from the department or expired), various chemicals, pressure vessels, radioactive waste, and amputee parts bodies.
The disposal of medical waste is a big environmental problem, but also a problem for medical institutions
It is considered that for each patient bed there is an average of 1.8 kg of waste. The potentially most dangerous waste is infectious, chemical and radioactive waste. Infectious contains agents (from blood and blood derivatives, among them the HIV virus, which fortunately is extremely sensitive and hardly survives in the external environment) – say technologists for the treatment of medical waste.
For solid waste, there is mainly the problem of disposal of sharp objects that are used in various interventions. Infectious agents stay longer in needles. If a person is accidentally stung, that person can become infected with hepatitis C or B.
Scalpels, needles, lancets, syringes, swabs, gauze and other materials can be carriers of various viruses and infections. We should also mention medicines, which are also potentially dangerous waste (because the disposal and destruction of unused and expired medicines is a big but solvable problem). As much as 80% of all types of medical waste are mostly disposed of in landfills together with municipal waste. Clearly prescribed and precise laws solve this type of problem – in many countries of the world, there are already such precise regulations and even factories for the processing and destruction of medical and chemical waste – according to world standards.
About 70 to 80% of the total waste in healthcare institutions is liquid waste (which is often discharged via wastewater). That is why it is important to clean up liquid waste from hospitals, but in a proper way (because they are a suitable environment for the development of infection). For example, the lifetime of a thermometer in a hospital is less than a month. If each hospital has an average of 100 thermometers, then over the course of a year, a larger amount of toxic mercury leaks into the waste water.
The technologists further explain that amputated body parts, just like placentas, are stored in cold storage until burial in the city cemetery and under the supervision of sanitary inspections. Many developed countries of the world have systems for controlling medical waste and conditions for elimination. There are also plants for burning this waste and modern sterilization devices to prevent uncontrolled mixing with other garbage. In the world, various types of technologies are used to manage medical waste (for example, double control of sterilization and crushing and shredding of sterilized material until it is unrecognizable. This way, medical waste turns into municipal waste and is completely inedible.
Some countries (without the possibility of storage and without facilities for the destruction of medical waste) export and destroy (burn) medical waste abroad, i.e. in some of the European countries that have incinerators. Everywhere in Europe, the law obliges whoever generates this waste to pay for its removal and destruction.