Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare establishments cater to hundreds of people – sick or healthy – with various health services that could benefit them professionally or maybe for personal reasons. It has become the source of good or bad news, and a lot of important decisions are made in these establishments. Aside from these life-changing information and decisions, there are other alarming things these healthcare establishments are keeping.

Medical wastes and the danger they pose

Medical wastes are common in hospitals and clinics, and it can’t be avoided. From examinations to general check-ups, there are bound to be extractions and medical waste generated from a few minutes of interactions. While it’s understandable that these items can’t be recycled since it can be contaminated and dangerous, the only way to keep these wastes contained is through proper waste disposal.

In the US alone, there are 5,534 hospitals throughout the country, and it produces 4 million pounds of medical waste yearly – and that’s just one country! There’s even an instance in Ventura County wherein untreated and bloody medical wastes were found in a dumpsite – not properly thrown and taken care of.

Dealing with hazardous wastes:

Any of these needles, shards of used test tubes, and even the samples themselves can pose as a danger to people who handles ordinary wastes and an unaware civilian as well. Here are some helpful ways these trashes can be properly disposed and treated:

• When a patient is cured and is discharged, the waste they gathered should be carefully disposed in a specific container to avoid cross-contamination. Make sure you brief your cleaning staff to do this and to handle it with caution and care.
• It’s important to segregate the normal everyday trashes and medical waste to keep the staff safe.
• Contact a medical waste disposing company with specialised technology that would deal with these wastes. Make sure that the accumulated waste is enough for the pick up and delivered to a special treatment facility for medical waste.

What happens in the facility:

• When it arrives in the facility, it gets scanned to know what’s inside the bin before it gets to the machine. It will let them know how much it weighs and where it came from – a proper procedure to make sure it doesn’t get mixed up with the others.
• It will then be sterilized and then decontaminates it just in case it has residue that is still harmful upon contact.
• It will then go through a heavy duty grinder that will crush most of the medical waste it gets fed of – and it will definitely crush the items that survived the grinding with reverse routers.
• After being grounded by the heavy duty grinder, it will then separate the solid and liquid waste and then rerouted to microwave tunnel to be decontaminated completely.
• It will be then recycled to become building material and will be completely safe to handle.