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Bio-Hazardous Waste Disposal Fort Lauderdale – Reducing Medical Waste

The study called “Medical Waste Management in the Operating Room” says that United States health care facilities (such as hospitals, clinics, nursery homes and so on) fill landfills with about four billion pounds of waste every year. Fortunately, as the World Health Organization (WHO) claims, about 75 to 90 percent of this waste does not fall into the risky, biohazardous category and can disposed using sound medical waste management efforts. For those that are biohazardous, a bio-hazardous waste disposal technique is necessary.

One of the jobs of health care industry generating medical waste, as well as bio-hazardous waste disposal companies helping them in this task is to reduce the volume of medical waste that they are producing every year. In this regard, a hospital or other medical care facility, for example from Fort Lauderdale in Florida, can take the following steps to ensure that medical waste is a less of a problem in the future.

  1. Classify waste. This will lower contamination levels as well as the volume of waste that needs to be treated using one of bio-hazardous waste disposal methods. Make sure that you have well positioned receptacles such as waste bags and containers and that it is clearly visible from looking at them what type of waste goes in them and what doesn’t. For example, red waste bags are supposed to hold biohazardous waste and nothing else.
  2. Purchase items that you will be able to use again. Gone are the days of for-singe-use items. Instead, the growing trend in the health care industry and most other industries as well is to use items that can be reused or recycled. For example, sharps, such as needles and scalpels can be sterilized using an autoclave (a machine that uses steam to destroy pathogens from solid waste such as needles( and then reused.
  3. Recycle whatever and whenever you can. For example, you can recycle blue wrap used for covering surgical instruments.
  4. Whenever you can, reprocess medical instruments like orthopedics blades, ultrasonic scalpels or ophthalmic knives, instead of disposing them after one use. Reprocessing should include cleaning, sterilizing, repackaging and relabeling medical tools for reuse.
  5. Buy a reusable sharps container. This is especially important for medical waste management as sharps containers are one of the most commonly used receptacles in bio-hazardous waste disposal. As such, it stands to no reason to throw them away every time. Instead, reusable sharps containers can be sterilized and cleaned with a proper solution and brought back to use immediately.
  6. Have a well-established program for recycling medical waste. Educate and train your staff in the importance and need for recycling waste. Stimulate recycling of any disposables, be they paper, plastic, glass or metal that the medical care staff, other personnel in your facility or patients and visitors produce daily.

As you can see, medical waste management can be made into a much easier job if health care institutions make a concentrated effort to reduce the amount of waste (not just medical waste) that they generate every year. With this, the costs of bio-hazardous waste disposal that weigh down many hospitals and clinics and the risks of environmental pollution and public infections posed by Florida medical waste will be greatly reduced.