Burning piles of used gloves, test kits and syringes release toxic pollutants. But there are ways to improve medical recycling
The COVID pandemic is not just a public health crisis. It is also an environmental one. After more than 430 million reported cases of the disease around the world, the pandemic has generated huge amounts of medical garbage in the form of test kits, gloves, masks, syringes and other products that people at clinics and hospitals use once and then toss away.
According to the WHO’s calculations, 87,000 metric tons of personal protective equipment and other medical products were shipped to countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bangladesh between March 2020 and November 2021. Most of that material was used and then tossed away.
Ideally most medical waste—related to COVID or otherwise—would be sterilized and then recycled. But for this to happen, the refuse must be split up into its various components, which is a capability that many countries do not have. “One of the biggest problems we face is that the waste is not segregated at the hospital ward,” says Amos Gborie, director of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health at the National Public Health Institute of Liberia.
Some countries are now experimenting with ways to segregate medical waste for recycling and safer disposal. Hospitals in Liberia, for instance, have recently begun deploying color-coded disposal bins in an effort to sort the waste. Health Care Without Harm promotes needle-cutting devices that prevent “stick injuries” from syringes. “Without the needle, all vaccination waste, including the vials and packaging, is completely recyclable,” Stringer says. “We can make that waste disappear.
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