The correct treatment of hospital waste is a challenge as important as it is demanding: the management of this type of waste, in fact, is regulated by a strict normative (consultable in detail at this link), necessary to ensure the safety of operators who come into contact with these potentially hazardous materials and, even more importantly, to protect public health, which could be put at risk in case of dispersion or contamination.
CAMEC designs, manufactures and sets up customized plants for the treatment of hospital waste, which allow companies to operate in full compliance with regulations, ensuring the achievement of the highest safety standards and maximizing the quantity of material correctly treated and recovered, ready to be used for further uses.
How to differentiate hospital waste
It is important to note, first of all, that not all waste produced in a hospital is necessarily hazardous: the normative establishes that all waste produced by public and private structures that carry out medical and veterinary activities of prevention, diagnosis, care, rehabilitation and research, regardless of their hazardousness, must be considered as "healthcare waste".
A complex structure such as a hospital or a care home will therefore produce various types of "healthcare waste", which must be treated differently depending on their characteristics:
- The non-hazardous healthcare waste (boxes, packaging, food waste, waste produced during meal preparation...) must be treated as normal municipal waste, provided that they have not come into contact with infectious environments.
- The non-hazardous healthcare waste (e.g. metal or glass waste that is not bulky and not sharp) must be managed as normal non-hazardous waste.
- The hazardous healthcare waste not at risk of infection (e.g. batteries, instruments containing mercury, reagents used in analysis laboratories) must be treated as special waste.
- The hazardous healthcare waste at risk of infection (needles, syringes, catheters, dressing material, sharp objects, objects coming from environments at risk of infection...) must be managed with special care, to avoid the spread of infections. The phases of preliminary storage, collection and transport must comply with the regulations governing the treatment of hazardous waste, and once they reach the treatment plant they must be thermally destroyed or sterilized in special plants.
- The waste that requires special disposal methods (expired or contaminated medicines, cytotoxic drugs, psychotropic substances...) must be incinerated.
The treatment of hospital waste
The normative establishes that the treatment of hospital waste must aim to optimize the methods of collection and differentiation, reduce their hazardousness and promote, where possible, their recovery and recycling. To achieve this result, it is important to respect the protocols that regulate the phases of preliminary storage, movement and treatment of waste, which must be rigorously separated and stored in different containers depending on the presence or absence of infectious risk and the presence or absence of sharp objects.
The waste that presents an infectious risk must be shredded, moved and sterilized in special hermetic containers, capable of guaranteeing the complete isolation of the material from the external environment in all phases of processing. The waste thus separated, once reduced in size, is subjected to final sanitation treatments aimed at reducing their bacterial load to the level at which the law allows them to be defined as "sterile". Once this treatment is completed, the waste can be considered as special non-hazardous waste and therefore used as a normal waste fuel.
In this way, it is possible to reuse even the most complex waste, avoiding the need to resort to procedures such as incineration which, while not constituting a health risk, generate atmospheric emissions.
The CAMEC plants for the treatment of hospital waste
The plants for the treatment of healthcare waste designed by CAMEC are built in a customized way starting from the needs of the structure that will use them and put safety first in all phases of shredding and sanitation, to minimize the risk of environmental pollution and protect the health of operators.
All phases of material movement are performed through stainless steel containers, perfectly hermetic, which allow to send the hazardous material to the shredder and, subsequently, to the sterilizer where the sanitation procedures take place. The material thus obtained is not only perfectly safe from a health point of view but also adequately reduced in volume and uniform in size: this allows to reuse it in an optimal way, in full compliance with the regulations that govern this delicate sector.
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