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How to Package Biomedical Waste Properly

Packaging is considered as one of the most important components of medical waste management Davie. Currently, packaging is regulated by at least three different sets of laws, both on the state and on the federal level. The regulations are, naturally, different from one U.S. state to another, but they all have the same purpose, making sure that health care facilities and other producers of medical waste perform their bio-medical waste disposal duties diligently and without harming either public health or the ecosystem.

This short article is intended to provide you some basic guidelines about bio-medical waste disposal packaging. If you intend to package bio-medical waste on your own, this could prove useful to you. Let’s get started,

  1. Obtain the proper documentation. Consult with your local government’s office for medical waste management to learn what documents to you need to get in order to package bio-medical waste yourself. Don’t start anything before you do this step first. A minimal fine for wrong packaging of bio-medical waste is $250 for every occurrence and can go up to $50,000. If your wrong packaging and thus also bio-medical waste disposal lead to someone’s death, your fine will go up to $100,000. If you are running a commercial business, let’s say a medical waste management Davie company, this is something that you would want to avoid.
  2. If you are disposing of medical waste at home, the situation is much simpler. Albeit you still have to be careful with how you dispose of needles and used medicine bottles, for example, the penalties for getting bio-medical waste disposal and packaging are not as heavy. Still, that does not mean that there aren’t any and that you shouldn’t use common sense when packaging medical waste at home.
  3. Use sharps box. For items such as needles, syringes, scalpels, razor blades and pretty much anything that is used in medical care for either treating or diagnosing a patient, or for medical research perhaps, and that can lacerate or puncture a skin, including broken glass from vials and hard plastic, you need to use a puncture-resistant and leak proof hard plastic container, better known as a “sharps container” or “sharps box”. The purpose of this container is to protect the person handling medical waste from any injuries that can be caused by one of these sharp instruments or items and also minimize or completely remove the chance of a person handling waste get infected by a blood-borne viruses (such as Hepatitis B or C or HIV). You can purchase sharps containers from your local pharmacy, a medical service point or from a medical waste management Davie company in your region.
  4. There is usually no need for packaging medical waste liquids, such as blood, feces, urine, or other body fluids. These should first be disinfected using a proper chemical solution and then disposed through a sanitary sewage system.
  5. Train your staff in packaging. One of the biggest offenses for a commercial Davie bio-medical waste disposal company when it comes to packaging medical waste is having untrained staff do this. Not only can the company be fined for such conduct, but they are also endangering their workers, the public and the environment this way.