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Medical Waste Removal Fort Lauderdale: Big Medical Waste Court Cases
What do you think about medical waste management? Let’s say that you are running a small hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States. As a healthcare provider, you help a lot of people get better from their ailments and injuries, but all that treatment and diagnosing also produces large amounts of waste, which is, considering it is different from regular waste in a number of things (most notably being often bio-hazardous), called medical waste.
Medical waste basically includes any solid material that was contaminated by human or animal blood, body fluids or other tissue. I am not going to number everything that can be a candidate for medical waste removal, but I’ll name a few items. Needles, syringes, scalpels (and other “sharps”) human and/or animal body parts, blood and blood products (both human and animal), surgical gloves, bandages, bed sheets and anything else soiled or otherwise contaminated by blood. Do you get the idea?
Now, I know what some of you may be thinking (and I sincerely hope no one who runs a healthcare facility reading this thinks like this). Why bother with proper Fort Lauderdale medical waste removal? It is certainly expensive to hire a medical waste management company in the aforementioned Fort Lauderdale, as it is anywhere else in the United States, and only the biggest hospitals have their own facilities where they can, disinfect or incinerate their medical waste. Plus, all that medical waste management also includes classifying, packaging, labeling and a whole lot of other stuff that I am sure you would rather avoid.
Well, you can’t avoid doing proper medical waste removal. Even the biggest companies get nailed because of this, as you will now learn on the following three cases. Now, I need you to keep your eyes open and soak this info very carefully, because you never know when you are going to need it. At the very least, you’ll know why you can’t sidestep proper medical waste management.
Walmart
That’s right, one of the biggest chain of shopping centers from Florida to California got busted for improper hazardous waste management and polluting the environment. Although this case may not concern medical waste per se, it is still important to know about it.
Walmart was found guilty with a capital “G” for illegal dumping of waste in California. The corporation had to pay a whooping $27.6 million for allegations of wrongfully handling and disposing of waste from its stores across California. The investigation, which lasted for five years, included 32 different groups and 20 prosecutors in support of the environment. According to allegations, which Walmart was not able to dispute, all 236 stores were involved disobeying both state and federal laws and regulations regarding environment.
Washington University
Perhaps more applicable to medical waste management is the court case that involved the Washington University from St. Louis in Missouri. You’ve probably heard of this institution as the heart and home to some of the most renowned medical schools in the United States. You would think that this would be the last place on earth (or at least the US) where things like this would happen, but it isn’t so. Namely, both the medical school and the Danforth campuses were heavily fined by EPA Region 7 on account of several medical waste management points. A part of the settlement indicates that the University now has to put into action an environmental project targeting biohazardous waste problems in high schools in the St Luis Public School District
