If you run a business that recycles, there’s a high likelihood that you’ve heard the concept of “recycling contamination”. What exactly is recycling contamination and why is it important? What impact does it have on your efforts to be sustainable? How can we avoid the contamination of clinical waste recycling?
It turns out that the issue of contamination in recycling is easily solvable. This is all you need to know about the effects of recycling on our environment that includes the most common contaminants and the ways you can in bringing our planet to an eco-friendly economy.
What Is The Cause Of Recycling Contamination?
The risk of contamination comes when the materials are put in the incorrect recycling bin (placing glass bottles into an unmixed paper recycling bin for instance) or when the substances are not cleaned properly, for example, for instance, when food residue remains on a yoghurt plastic container.
It is often call the aspirational recycling method, since you’re just throwing something in the garbage in the hope that it will make it to where it’s suppose to be at some point. However, this isn’t always the case.
Different Types Of Recycling Contamination
Contaminants make your recycling just garbage. There are numerous types of contamination in recycling, such as tiger stripe bag, plastics, and many more. Certain contaminants are more harmful than others, but they can be avoid as you can see in the following table of statistics on recycling contamination:
1 Contaminant Plastic Bags
Plastic bags and other items made of plastic (i.e. bubble wrap, shrink wrapping, plastic bags paper bags, trash bags etc.). are the biggest contaminator of recycling of all.
Take them out of the recycling bin to save recyclers in your recycling centre the burden of additional removal work, while saving their machines from getting block.
2 Contaminant: Food Waste
Items that are not recyclable quickly turn into garbage once they contain the leftovers of food items they once contain.
It might see green. It’s true that paperboard use to transport food generally goes to landfill. This is also true of food waste in cans and jars that are recyclable with one notable exception being an incredibly clean peanut butter jar.
3 Contaminant: Shredded Paper In The Form Of Loose Shredded
The most desirable feature of recycle paper is its long fiber. The reason for this is that long fibers are able to endure numerous recycling cycles. Although shred paper isn’t consider to be a contaminant in its entirety, the loose shred paper could cause a variety of recycling problems.
When shred paper is mix with non-shred papers, it can be difficult to recycle at a material recovery facility (MRF). The issue lies due to the small pieces.
To address this issue, those who would like to reuse their paper could simply put it in the clear plastic bag. It can later be store together with other recyclable items.
4 Contaminant Brightly Colored Papers
Recycling program head at the University of Colorado at Boulder explained the problem with brightly colored note paper well when he made the analogy of the red-sock-in-the-white-load.
That gives a decent image of what can happen when brightly colored paper is able to ruin a batch of good recycled paper.
5 Contaminant: Hazardous Waste
Containers use for auto fluids and paint or pesticides should be remove separately or, in the case of certain facilities, clean them out prior to when they are able to be reuse.
Contact your local recycling or clinical waste program director to learn about the procedures needed to ensure that these materials can be reused.
What Are The Issues In Biomedical Waste?
Mixing clinical waste management with household waste resulted in infections, since the majority of garbage was disposed of at the landfills.
There is no proper management or garbage disposal in hospitals and other medical centres that are covid-designate.
Discarding of Covid-relate items, such as face shields and masks etc. , along roads, hospitals, health centres and other areas.
What Government Initiatives Exist To Deal With Biomedical Waste?
The government has introduce Biomedical Waste Management Guidelines in 2016 which are regularly review with the help of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in light of the current covid pandemic. The most recent CPCB guidelines include:
It requires bio-waste being pack into bags that are double-layer and then transport by specially-design vehicles to designate biomedical waste treatment facilities to be use for incineration, autoclaving, or burning to create energy.
- The CPCB has developed a unique mobile application called “Covid-19 BWM (Biomedical Waste Management) App ” for keeping the track of pandemic-related data and the handling of hazardous waste.
The CPCB offers training on handling hazardous waste and infection prevention methods, including hand hygiene, respiratory hygiene as well as other necessary measures with the help of videos and demonstrations.
How Do Medical Wastes Are Treated?
There are three major disposal methods for medical waste:
Autoclaving.
The majority of biohazardous waste is burn using this method. The materials are store in a container that is specially design with high temperatures and pressure, which causes it to be destroy. Or it’s zap in a microwave-on-steroids to exactly the same effect.
Chemical Disinfection.
Certain biohazardous wastes may be chemically disinfect, and later place in the landfill like other kinds of garbage.
Encapsulation.
It is also use to make the medical-waste experts refer to as “sharps,” which is a hazardous material that has the ability to cut through traditional waste containers and thus propagate their evil. One of the most obvious is the syringes.
This type of clinical waste collection can be “encapsulated” into containers that are puncture-proof and separated from the pedestrian trash that is thrown into landfills.
Waste Segregation
The Bio Medical Rules have outlined an approach to disposal that instructs the organisations that handle clinical waste services to separate biomedical waste at a personal level and into containers that are coloured blue, red, yellow and black, based on the type of biomedical waste.
The variety of types of bio-medical waste has decrease compare to the prior bio-medical rules, is intend to facilitate an easy separation of all bio-medical waste.
Storage Norms
The businesses that handle bio-medical waste may keep bio-medical waste for as long as the period of 48 (forty eight) hours. Following the expiration of the period above the health care institutions must make sure that the waste doesn’t harm the health of the human or environmental environment and inform the appropriate authority in writing.
The clinical waste solution Rules also have establish the bar code system that is use for containers/bags that contain biomedical waste. The bags must also be equip with GPS that is attach to it in order that bio-medical waste can be identify.
Waste Treatment
The bio-medical waste will be treat by the standard medical waste facility base on the colour that the bag. The various colours of the bags indicate different methods for treating the waste, namely incineration autoclaving, deep burial shredding and chemical treatment and disposal in a landfill and so on.
Health care entities are anyway responsible for pre-treatment of laboratory and microbiological waste, blood samples and blood bags through disinfection/sterilisation on-site in the manner prescribed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) or National Aids Control Organisation (NACO), irrespective of the fact whether final treatment and disposal happens on-site or at a common biomedical waste treatment facility.
Summary
The developing countries are in desperate need of more strict laws and rules. The latest Bio Medical Rules have in extent attempted to cover all entities that deal with bio-medical waste. It could be regard as progress when the Bio Medical Rules are implement properly.
All health care facilities, including clinics are under the obligation to ensure appropriate identification and segregation of the source of the generation, recycling in colored containers in a safe manner, secure transportation, proper treatment, and sustainable disposal of biomedical waste are in place.
