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Many individuals have a condition because of which they require daily treatments and use of needles at home. They could be treating diabetes, or keeping HIV in check. One of the problems they are often facing is how to safely dispose of their sharps? In this short article, I want to give you some useful tips and guidelines on bio-medical waste disposal for your used needles at home. Hopefully, this little tidbit of Pompano Beach medical waste management information will be useful to you.

First, of all, just like in health care facilities, one of the first rules in home bio-medical waste disposal is that you first have to make sharps wastes safe for disposal. You can’t just chuck them in the trash bin in front of your lawn or the dumpster at the back of your building. If you are doing this, you should seriously stop with this practice as you are endangering other people’s health. Someone can get stabbed on your needle.

Since needles, whether they are used at home or at a health care facility are used on people in treating various illnesses, they are bound to get contaminated with infected blood. This is why you first have to sterilize them well with a good, hospital-grade disinfectant which you can buy in a local pharmacy or even a store where they sell chemicals.

What You’ll Need

You will, of course, need a couple of items to render your used sharps safe for bio-medical waste disposal, such as:

  • A sharps container
  • Disposable rubber gloves
  • Disinfectant (you can use bleach solution if it’s more affordable)
  • Needle clippers (you might get by with toenail clippers)
  • Duct tape

How it’s Done

Okay, here we go.

  1. First things, first, don’t start anything until you’ve put on a pair of rubber gloves. You want to protect yourself from getting pricked by one of your needles, right?
  2. Pour some liquid disinfectant or a bleach solution inside the sharps container. The sharps container should be made from a sturdy material (hard plastic or metal), should be leak-proof (you don’t want all that bleach or disinfectant to go out), resistant to puncture, breaking or bending. In fact, although you can buy most of the things to render a used needle at home safe for bio-medical waste disposal, this is, in my honest opinion, one of the things that you should purchase from a medical waste management company or a pharmacy.
  3. Once you have poured enough bleach solution (the ratio of bleach and water should be 1:10) carefully put the sharps you want to disinfect in inside and let them soak for about 10-15 minutes. Don’t forget to read the instructions on the disinfectant bottle, just to be sure how long should you keep the sharps inside the solution.
  4. Finally, take the sharps out of the disinfectant and using clippers (needle works best, but you can use toenail clippers as well), clip the end of the needle.
  5. Put the sharps waste inside the container, remove the gloves that you were hopefully wearing all this time and place them in the container as well. Close the container and seal it for extra security with some duct tape.
  6. Label the container and list the contents. You can write something like “for bio-medical waste removal” and sent it to your local Pompano Beach medical waste management company.