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Medical Waste Disposal Services How to Protect the Environment. The healthcare industry is one of the largest in terms of employment, with more than 18 million people working as nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals. This also means there are many hazardous and potentially harmful materials used within hospitals, doctor’s offices, clinics, and other medical facilities. Various types of medical waste must be disposed of on a regular basis to protect the safety of both patients and hospital staff. If not handled properly, contaminated materials can spread disease or bloodborne pathogens if left unprotected. Fortunately, there are many ways that healthcare professionals can protect the environment while disposing of their medical waste safely.
Medical waste is any type of waste that is either contaminated with infectious materials or potentially infectious materials. This can include items like syringes, bandages with blood and bodily fluids on them, contaminated used hospital gowns, and other potentially biohazardous materials. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified common types of medical waste: contaminated items, cultures and stocks, blood, and pathogenic waste. Contaminated items are items that are visibly soiled with blood or other bodily fluids. Cultures and stocks are laboratory supplies that contain potentially infectious microorganisms. Blood includes both liquid and solid materials (e.g., blood bags, blood-contaminated items). Pathogenic waste is waste that is known or suspected to contain an infectious disease-causing microorganism.
Another way to protect the environment is to make sure that you are properly segregating medical waste. Most fines that occur are from improper segregation, or disposal and not from a willful disregard of regulations but from a lack of training or understanding by an employees of what waste goes where.
While many facilities and healthcare organizations handle their own medical waste, when it comes to treatment and disposal it is often more efficient and less costly to hire a professional medical waste disposal company. This way, you can focus on providing high-quality healthcare and patient care, instead of spending time and money on the proper disposal of waste. When choosing a medical waste disposal company, make sure to choose a company that is properly licensed and compliant with all federal, state, and local regulations. The biggest difference when hiring a medical waste disposal company is to ask about their procedures for treatment and disposal, do they own and operate their own medical waste treatment plant, or do they take it and pay someone else to treat it?
A company that owns its own medical waste treatment plant, has invested it itself to provide you with cradle to grave medical waste management services, often this gives you better rates, you know the company cares about how the waste is processed because it is their business, and a medical waste processing plant is regulated and registered with the state, meaning your waste won’t end up in the wrong place. Do they offer environmentally friendly services? Do they have alternative fuel vehicles, all-electric vehicles, etc. This will give you insight into the type of company you are working with, a company that has visibly invested in things that provide a reduction in waste, carbon footprints, etc. is a company that is spending money on lessoning it’s impact on the environment.
At Bio-MED we own our own medical waste processing plant to ensure we can minimize our impact on the environment, we use reusable containers to lesson our impact in landfills (no plastic going into landfills), we have a shredding service to further reduce waste size, and we added an all-electric service truck to our fleet to reduce our carbon footprint. We care about the quality of service we offer our customers, and the environment and it shows in our infrastructure.
We do all of this to be able to provide you with the best possible service, in the greenest manner possible, at an affordable price.
