Top Reasons Why You Should Manage Medical Waste Properly

by Mason Whittaker Contructor

Medical waste is hazardous. Without well-defined medical waste disposal protocols, a business can damage its environment. For example, improperly disposing of medical waste will adversely affect water supply, spread disease, disrupt wildlife, and damage brand reputation. That is why businesses must reinforce the significance of disposing of medical waste properly with their employees. Getting rid of medical wastes effectively enables a business to create a workplace that is safe for patients and workers. As a medical facility owner, you will understand the impact of the waste that your business produces. Here, we will look at the top reasons for disposing of medical waste properly.

 

Having a hazardous nature

 

You may be interested to know what the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies as medical waste. The WHO has categorised medical waste into the following categories.

 

•        Pathological: Contaminated animal carcasses and human tissue
•       Infectious: Bodily fluids, bandages from isolated patients, animal wastes, blood, and stocks and cultures of infectious agents that are usually used for research purposes
•        Sharps: Syringes, needles, blades, and broken glass that may expose anyone to infection or injure them
•        Chemicals: Disinfectants, solvents, mercury from thermometers, heavy metals, and batteries from different medical devices
•         Pharmaceuticals: Unused, contaminated, and expired drugs
•    Genotoxic: Carcinogenic, teratogenic, and mutagenic substances that are primarily used during cancer treatment
•          Radioactive: Chiefly diagnostic materials used in radiotherapies
•         General: Other generic medical waste commonly found in medical setups

 

The WHO’s estimates that up to 15 per cent of medical waste comes under the non-generic category. Now, that is a whopping amount of harmful waste, which has the potential to dent the ecology.

 

Putting medical staff at risk

 

Until the time your facility’s medical waste is disposed of, your staff can be easily harmed by it. As a result, your employees are not permitted to dispose of infectious materials and sharps in standard waste bins. If your staff, on the other hand, throws sharp objects into a standard waste collector, anyone picking up waste material is likely to injure their hands. Furthermore, disposing of sharps in a standard wastebasket exposes your support staff and medical workers to disease transmission, including:

 

•          HIV
•          Ebola
•          Syphilis
•          Hepatitis
•          Malaria

 

Even worse, some of these diseases may have lifelong impacts and may even cause death if the infected person is not treated on time.

 

Risking the community

 

Traditionally, the majority of medical waste is disposed of in landfills. However, before dumping medical waste into disposal areas, you should consider the magnitude of the risks that your community will face as a result. When you dump medical waste on the ground, you are putting the people who live nearby in immediate danger. And the negative effects of medical waste do not stop at the landfill. Medical waste, in fact, emits harmful substances into the air and water of the land where it is disposed of. Worse, most medical waste materials have a long half-life, which means they can take a thousand years to degrade.

 

Disrupting water supply

 

When your facility fails to properly dispose of medical waste, it can seep into a nearby community's water supply. If you decide to dump your medical waste anywhere on the ground, it can easily become absorbed by the soil. Later on, the medical waste remnants mixed with soil may seep into the groundwater. Finally, groundwater can enter rivers, streams, and springs. It doesn't stop there, either. That groundwater has the potential to easily become human drinking water. And we don't need to tell you that even a trickle of medical waste in water can be hazardous to human health.

 

SOLO: A strategic medical waste disposal partner

 

At Solo Resource Recovery, we empower you to manage medical waste safely and in an eco-friendly way. Our medical waste disposal processes are in line with every facility’s aim to minimise the chances of:

•          Spreading infections
•          Causing pollution
•          Creating injury
•          Promoting chemical toxicity

 

We make sure medical waste is contained, transported, and disposed of as per legal requirements. In addition, we ensure that the waste matter is dumped only at EPA-approved sites. We help medical facilities dispose of different waste materials, including:

 

·         Sharps such as needles and other sharp-edged medical instruments

·         Blood-soaked and soiled bandages

·         Culture dishes and related glassware

·         Discarded surgical gloves and scalpels

·         Stocks and swabs used for inoculating cultures

·         Pharmaceuticals and similar items

 

Our medical waste collection services are used by surgeons, dentists, hospitals, pharmaceutical units, and life science facilities. We offer different sharps container collection solutions as well. As per this service, we use a 240-litre bin used for disposing of sharps. If you do not need such a high-capacity disposal bin, we have a range of special-purpose bags in different capacities ranging from 1.5 litres to 120 litres.

 

However, the availability of medical waste disposal services may vary from location to location. That is why it is essential to connect with our sales representative to check whether our medical waste management solutions are available in your location.

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Created on Oct 26th 2021 07:27. Viewed 195 times.

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