What is Medical Waste Disposal?
Medical waste disposal is the disposal of any potentially infectious waste that is produced by a health care facility or other facility that deals with biomedical waste.
According to the Medical Waste Tracking Act from 1988, medical waste is:
“Any solid waste that is generated in the diagnosis, treatment, or immunization of human beings or animals, in research pertaining thereto, or in the production or testing of biological.”
In general, medical waste can be defined as any material produced by a health care facility that has the potential to be infectious. This type of waste can be generated by any type of health care facility, including hospitals, blood banks, clinics, dental offices, physician’s offices, veterinary clinics, laboratories and medical research centers.
Looking at these two definitions (the one from the Medical Waste Tracking Act 1988 and the general definition), the following types of waste require medical waste disposal:
- Blood-soaked bandages
- culture dishes and other glassware
- discarded surgical gloves
- discarded surgical instruments
- discarded needles used to give shots or draw blood
- cultures, stocks, swabs used to inoculate cultures
- removed body organs
- discarded lancets
What Are Some of the Types of Medical Waste Disposal?
There are three medical waste disposal methods currently in use in the United States. These are:
- On-site disposal
- Mail disposal
- Truck service disposal
For on-site disposal, the facility that generates this waste must have the proper industrial equipment. Unfortunately, this equipment is often very expensive to get, install and to maintain so a lot of smaller health care facilities don’t have it.
Because on-site disposal is often too expensive, especially for smaller health care facilities, they typically rely on the other two disposal methods – mail disposal and truck service disposal. When it comes to the first, it is done by way of shipping waste through U.S. Mail. Since this type of waste is classified as “potentially infectious” and can pose a danger to the environment, it comes under some very strict postal rules and regulations (for instance, all containers must be tested and approved by the postal service before they can be used).
The last of the three methods, truck disposal service, includes hiring an independent MW waste disposal company. This company then uses its own biohazard containers and special trucks to move such waste to a treatment facility for final destruction.
Again, what medical waste disposal the health care facility will use depends on a number of things, not the least of them being the size of the facility and if it has its own special treatment facilities. Other than that, the type of biomedical waste also factors in on the decision, as well as a number of other things.
As you can see from this article, medical waste is a potentially hazardous material to the environment and its proper disposal is of great importance. Because of this, choosing the type of MW disposal is a crucial decision the management of the health care facility has to make.
Too deep in medical waste? Contact Medical Waste Management (MWM) at https://medicalwastefl.com/ or call 305-677-2343, get your FREE QUOTE and let your local community know you are thinking about them.
