A scoping report prepared for Veolia Environmental Services details a request made by Hertfordshire County Council, asking the firm to “make provision at the plant for the sorting and transfer of clinical waste for which it is responsible” at its Hatfield incinerator.

http://www.whtimes.co.uk/news/clinical_waste_facility_will_be_included_at_incinerator_1_992639

Probably quite a good idea, reported in a well-balanced regional newspaper report that avoids sensationalism. However, this news will almost inevitably result in a strong “anti” protest concerns, no doubt vociferously, at some imaginary plague or pestilence from the inclusion of clinical wastes in the wastes received on site.

This is quite bizarre, when those same anti-incinerator campaigners are happy to lie in a hospital bed with clinical waste sacks mounted at locations around the ward. Though these days when rates of healthcare-associated infection are unacceptably common, though now decreasing, nobody bothers to make a connection at the ward level (there almost certainly isn’t one) but are happy to whip up a foment of complaint concerning the disposal of wastes that are an inevitable part of their own healthcare provision.

In some strange way, unknown to science, perhaps clinical wastes – those ubiquitous orange and yellow sacks that sit quietly in the corner of the hospital ward do somehow transform in transit to something far more dangerous that puts all of those within a wide radius at grave risk? Or perhaps not!