Needlestick injuries may carry devastating consequences, even is seroconversion does not occur. Needle-related injury is the first and most obvious concern though latterly the term ‘sharps injury’ has been introduced to widen the definition to include any item such as blades and broken glass that may break the skin and create an opportunity for the transmission of infection.
Sharps injury is still associated with needles and blades, and less so to broken glass items. However, if an item can break the skin surface, particularly to create a deep or penetrating injury then it might be classified as and will need to be managed as sharps waste. In extremis, this might include a sheet of paper – who has not suffered a paper cut at some time or another? – though that is perhaps taking matters too far since properly packaged the risk of injury is slight is not non-existent. However, if an item might puncture the thin walls of a waste sack AND is likely to cause penetrating injury, then sharps waste it is.
Rigid plastic pipettes within laboratory waste are an obvious risk since these often penetrate waste sacks and, if broken, fracture to create sharp points that might produce a nasty injury. Who knows what they had been used for?
Most laboratories now use sharps bins or the more convenient Bio-bins for pipette disposal, thereby reducing the risk of breakage and injury without, in the latter case, any increase in disposal cost. But chatter from the US hints at some laboratories now classifying Petri dish waste as sharps waste.
Petri dishes are used in vast quantities in hospital and other labs. Their flimsy construction makes damage rather common unless handled with care and when tossed into a clinical waste sack and compressed during subsequent handling this becomes rather likely. Sack puncture and subsequent sharps injury may well transmit infection, most likely a serious septic wound rather than infection with bloodborne virus but equally one that must be prevented.
Changes to the manufacture or Petri dishes is not possible. Sacks of greater puncture resistance may increase costs; more careful waste handling is improbable.
Perhaps rigid waste bins would be a more appropriate container for these wastes? Classification of these wastes as sharps waste seems unnecessary, though regulatory guidance and acknowledgement in a properly constructed ACoP would provide the necessary assurance that wastes will be properly and safely packaged without undue cost increase, while protecting those who may be required to handle the wastes as they pass along the disposal chain.