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One of the most dangerous and utterly irresponsible things that a health care facility or Miramar Medical Waste Disposal can do is to throw away their used needles and other sharps waste into regular trash bins and dumpsters. This can cause injury as well as transmit a blood-borne disease to a person who inadvertently cuts or pricks himself on it.
And yet, with that being said, many hospitals do just that and endanger people’s health. Because of this, government agencies in the United States have implemented a number of strict laws and rules regarding bio-hazardous waste disposal of sharps.
What follows in this short article are some common procedures for sharps waste disposal.
Wear Protective Equipment
Always wear PPE (personal protective equipment) when disposing of sharps. This, of course, includes rubber gloves, but you should also wear long sleeves and pants to protect your skin further.
The reason for this need for protection does not rest simply in protecting your skin from getting cut or stabbed by a used needle or scalpel, but also in the fact that used syringes may contain some chemicals and contaminated liquids that you would want to protect your epidermis from.
Purchase a Sharps Container
One of the basic rules of bio-hazardous waste disposal is never to throw away medical wastes, especially if they are infectious, with other types of waste. Instead, medical wastes generated by your health care facility need to go in red biohazard bags. One of the exceptions to this are sharps.
Sharps shouldn’t be put with the rest of the medical waste inside the red bag as a needle or a scalpel would easily pierce or cut open the waste bag and allow its biohazardous contents to spill out and endanger the ecosystem.
Due to this problem, sharps waste first has to be placed in a sharps container. These containers are also red (like the biohazard bag) and have a “biohazards” sign on the front. In addition, such a container should be puncture-resistant, leak-proof and preferably have handles for easier manipulation and carrying.
Sharps containers are usually purchased from a licensed medical waste management Miramar company, so contact one if you need somewhere to store your sharps before you destroy them or sterilize for reuse or recycle.
Make sure that you don’t overfill the sharps container, but only fill about 2/3 of it. This will prevent overspilling.
Clean and Close
When it is nearly full, fill the sharps container with a sanitizing solution to destroy pathogens. A mix of bleach and water will do the magic just fine, but you may also splash some more dough for a hospital-grade liquid sanitizing solution.
Once you’ve sanitized your sharps container, close the lid and put some shipping or duct tape for more security.
Finally, before you send the sharps container to a professional medical waste management Miramar company, make sure that you label it correctly. For sharps that you are sending for bio-hazardous waste removal, write “non-recyclable used sharps”. This will let those that handle medical waste know that the container in question and its contents are supposed to be destroyed and not recycled or reused.
