We are led to believe that there are opportunities for significant cost saving through improvement in source segregation of healthcare wastes.

That is probably true, and of course the environment is a worthy beneficiary, but the real cost versus the effort involved (of training, supervision and audit) make any saving rather limited in scope. Indeed, with staff costs running high any saving is possibly more apparent than real.

But don’t give up. A report from India tells of a hospital that is selling its waste, and profiting handsomely in the process. With considerable grass and plastics fractions, and a lust for low cost materials recycling that demands investment only in a cohort of exceptionally low paid workers, India may well have succeeded where we can not.

The income gained through selling waste outputs, of glass and plastic, are astonishing. By practising the principle of ‘segregation at source’, the biomedical waste management unit gets scrap in categories of plastic and glass.

The sale of this scrap is fetching King George’s Medical University around Rs 1.25 lakh per month. Using current currency conversion rates, that equates to income of a little more that £12,000 per month!

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-12-06/lucknow/44862524_1_waste-management-biomedical-waste-incinerable

There are several established technologies able to segregate with good precision different fractions from waste and the processing of autoclave and other shredded ATT floc should be a worthy environmental goal. Though markets have collapsed of late, the environmental advantage should find regulators pushing hard for this approach, or some suitable energy recovery process. Instead, and to their great shame, they prefer to tick the ‘hole in the ground’ box and landfill these ATT treatment residues.