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Medical wastes include the wastes created by biomedical research institutes, medical labs, and hospitals. Through exposure to infectious pathogens, improper waste treatment causes substantial hazards of disease transmission to waste workers, waste pickers, patients, health workers, and the population in general. Poor waste management releases dangerous and detrimental constituents into society. However, due of the volumes of wastes generated and its infectious nature, contamination of highly contagious agents such as the sudden pandemic has created huge instability in medical waste treatments and consequent recycling. Several nations have implemented safety procedures to counteract this pollution and manage medical wastes; nevertheless, these efforts are inadequate and vary depending on the nation. Moreover, worldwide organizations have recognized recommendations for the handling of medical wastes. Those rules are aiding in the management of highly infectious medical wastes generated by all-medical centers. Instead of sending things to landfills, proper medical wastes management may make available value by limiting disease transmission and enhancing recyclability. Disinfecting and classifying medical wastes enables for more sustainable management and reuse of important resources. This paper addresses the various medical solid wastes environmental impacts, management and disposal techniques used in various nations, the issues encountered throughout these strategies, and potential solutions to these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical waste management in Taiwan is a crucial issue due to its highly environmental and human health risks. The main objectives of this paper were to analyse the status of medical waste generation and treatment in recent years, and also address the discussions on the impacts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on its generation in the first half of 2020. It showed that the reported quantities have slightly increased from 35,747 metric tonnes (Mt) in 2016 to 40,407 Mt in 2019, showing an average increase by 4.17%. This rate of increase was consistent with the hospital services. When classified by the reported codes, the C-type waste (infectious waste) accounted for about 89% of the reported quantities, which indicated an annual increase by 4.14% during the same period. In addition, the medical waste treatment in 2019 was mainly dependent on the commissioned treatment (80.18%), followed by the recycling (18.53%) and the self-treatment (1.29%). Furthermore, the impact of COVID-19 on the medical waste generation in Taiwan was not significant in the first half of 2020 compared to the data during the years of 2016–2019. It was indicated that the consistent trend was observed at the daily confirmed COVID-19 cases in Taiwan during this period. Obviously, the reduction in the hospital medical services during the COVID-19 outbreak should be offset by the increase in medical waste generation from the medical services. In order to try to ensure safe and complete destruction of the COVID-19 virus, all the waste generated from the healthcare facilities should be treated in the incineration plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the developing world, healthcare waste management is a human health and environmental burden that should be solved for improving sustainability. Solutions should be introduced in the short term, concerning management, planning, financial assistance and expertise. The paper introduces an indicator set for assessing healthcare waste management in developing cities, implemented in La Paz (Bolivia) as a case study. The objective is to suggest an integrated management tool as a first assessment technique to identify the prevailing problems with a healthcare waste management system. Results suggest that, in La Paz, the application of such indicators is useful for evaluating which priorities should be addressed for improving the healthcare waste management system. The tool was applied for introducing a study necessary for the application of new management plans, especially concerning healthcare waste treatment. The method can be replicated in other contexts worldwide, with a focus on the developing world, for comparing cities, management solutions and improvements carried out along the years. The approach is of interest for boosting sustainability and human health, improving the awareness of the actors and policy-makers involved in waste management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hospital waste management is an imperative environmental and public safety issue, due to the waste's infectious and hazardous character. This paper examines the existing waste strategy of hospital in with a bed capacity. The segregation, collection, packaging, storage, transportation and disposal of waste were monitored and the observed problematic areas documented. The wastewater's toxicity was also investigated. During the study, omissions and negligence were observed at every stage of the waste management system, particularly with regard to the treatment of infectious waste. Inappropriate collection and transportation procedures for infectious waste, which jeopardized the safety of staff and patients, were recorded. However, inappropriate segregation practices were the dominant problem, which led to increased quantities of generated infectious waste and hence higher costs for their disposal. Infectious waste production was estimated using two different methods: one by weighing the incinerated waste. Furthermore, measurements of the parameter in wastewater samples revealed an increased toxicity in all samples. Proposals recommending the application of a comprehensive hospital waste management system are presented that will ensure that any potential risks hospital wastes pose to public health and to the environment are minimized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health institutes are structurally growing depending on the population increase and escalating demands for health services. As a negative result, the health industry produces more healthcare waste daily. Its efforts and resources cannot be sufficient to dispose of such medical wastes as the quantity and variety continue to increase. Therefore, developing solution partnership relations with logistics service providers specialized in collecting, storing, and disposing healthcare waste may be a beneficial and fruitful step for solving this problem. However, the evaluation and selection of service suppliers for healthcare waste disposal may not always result in success. Hence, the present work develops a robust integrated methodology on the basis of Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and COmplex PRoportional ASsessment (COPRAS) techniques based on Interval-Valued Fermatean Fuzzy Sets (IVFFSs) for healthcare decision-makers to make more rational and optimal decisions concerning service supplier selection. The proposed model based on the IVFFSs can also overcome incredibly complicated uncertainties in the assessment processes. A large-scale international hospital chain in Turkey is investigated using the developed methodology to find reasonable and logical solutions to assess and select the best Medical Waste Disposal and Logistics (MWDL) firm. It is revealed that the most important criterion is "Storage Conditions" where "Republic Services, Inc" is the most successful supplier of MWDL. Finally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed in detail in order to provide useful managerial insights and decision aids to assist in improving the sustainability of healthcare industry. [Display omitted] • The paper suggests a frame to solve the waste disposal firm selection problems. • The suggested a novel tool the IVFFS-Delphi method to identify the criteria. • The model consisting of the IVFFS-SWARA method to calculate the criteria weights. • The IVFFS-COPRAS technique was applied to determine the preference of the options. • The validity of the presented decision tool is confirmed through a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a global emergency and also has raised issues with waste management practices. This study emphasized the challenges of increased waste disposal during the COVID-19 crisis and its response practices. Data obtained from the scientific research papers, publications from the governments and multilateral organizations, and media reports were used to quantify the effect of the pandemic towards waste generation. A huge increase in the amount of used personal protective equipments (facemasks, gloves, and other protective stuffs) and wide distribution of infectious wastes from hospitals, health care facilities, and quarantined households was found. The amount of food and plastic waste also increased during the pandemic. These factors caused waste treatment facilities to be overwhelmed, forcing emergency treatment and disposals (e.g., co-disposal in a municipal solid waste incinerator, cement kilns, industrial furnaces, and deep burial) to ramp up processing capacity. This paper discussed the ways the operation of those facilities must be improved to cope with the challenge of handling medical waste, as well as working around the restrictions imposed due to COVID-19. The study also highlights the need for short, mid, and longer-term responses towards waste management during the pandemic. Furthermore, the practices discussed in this paper may provide an option for alternative approaches and development of sustainable strategies for mitigating similar pandemics in the future. [Display omitted] • COVID-19 exhibited great challenges and practices on waste management. • The discarded facemask was estimated during COVID-19 pandemic. • Immediate responses and technological approach for COVID-19 crisis were reviewed. • MSW incinerator, industrial furnace, cement kiln can be used as emergency disposal. • Short and mid-longer term responses in waste management were provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays there is a growing concern in the treatment of solid medical waste due to the increase in waste generation that has been accelerated by the pandemic. This accentuated the problems of medical waste management, related to separation, storage, and transportation. In addition, current medical waste treatments are not globally accepted, since most of them generate pollutants, or simply not all treatment technologies are applied correctly. This review analyzes the basis for proper management, and the main existing technologies and developments carried out so far. An exhaustive comparison between them allows for distinguishing the pros, cons, scales, and applicability of each one. This is complemented with a TRL analysis to describe their degree of development. Furthermore, some waste-to-energy (WtE) alternatives are discussed since they represent an appealing option that can positively affect the environment and the economy of existing technologies. Finally, some tools and technology selection criteria shown in the literature are presented, along with some discussion of their economics. This paper exposes a theoretical approach based on the literature on the current situation of solid medical waste treatment and provides the basis for decision-making to implement some existing technologies. Likewise, it presents the limitations in the current system that are the kick for future research. [Display omitted] • The recent sharp increase of medical waste raises the urgent need to a proper management. • High thermal technologies or their combination push power plants. • Analytical decision methodologies applied to select the most convenient technology. • Costs of medical waste recovery and recycling represent the main bottleneck. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elevated medical waste has urged the improvement of sustainable medical waste treatments. A bibliometric analysis is initially conducted to investigate scientific development of medical waste management to pinpoint the publication trends, influential articles, journals and countries and study hotspots. Publications on medical waste and its management sharply increased since 2020. The most influential article was written by Klemeš et al., and "Waste Management and Research" is the most productive journal. India, China, the United Kingdom, Iran and Italy have published the most works. The research spotlights have switched from "human" and "sustainable development" in 2019 to "COVID-19" and "circular economy" in 2021. Since government acts essentially in handling medical waste and controlling disease transmission, rule implementations among the abovementioned countries are summarized to seek gaps between scientific advancement and regulatory frameworks. For accomplishing a circular economy, waste-to-energy technologies (incineration, gasification, pyrolysis, plasma-based treatments, carbonization, hydrogenation, liquefaction, biomethanation, fermentation and esterification) are comprehensively reviewed. Incineration, gasification, pyrolysis and carbonization are relatively feasible methods, their characteristics and limitations are further compared. By holistically reviewing current status of medical waste research, the focal points involved in management at the policy and technical level have been highlighted to find proper routes for medical waste valorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Healthcare waste management is very important due to its hazardous nature that can cause risk to human health and the environment. In developing countries, healthcare waste has not received much attention and has been disposed of together with municipal waste. The aim of the study was to assess the healthcare waste management practices in Addis Ababa City Administration Public Health Facilities. Methods: An institutional-based cross-sectional design was used for the study at Addis Ababa city 15 Public health centres and 3 hospitals. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires distributed to 636 randomly selected healthcare waste handlers and managers. Observational check list also used. The data were entered into the EPI- INFO version TM 7 and exported to IBM SPSS 20 for analysis. Both descriptive and analytic statistics were employed. Results: Among the respondents, 358 (90.86%) from health centres and 96.38% (133) from hospitals indicated that their facilities had separate containers for hazardous and non-hazardous waste however, 61 (15.48%) from health centres and 29 (21.01%) from hospitals indicated that healthcare waste containers were not clearly marked or labelled. The study found that the main forms of on-site treatment of healthcare waste for health centres and hospitals before disposal were burning. Manager respondents from the health centres 65 (92.86%), 64 (91.43%) and from hospitals 31 (91.18%), 30 (88.24%) indicated that healthcare waste handlers were used protective clothing when handling waste and were provided with protective clothing when handling healthcare waste respectively. Conclusion: In this study healthcare waste management among healthcare waste handlers and healthcare facility managers were not getting full attention. Collection of healthcare waste were not done regularly, containers were not clearly marked and were not located in appropriate areas where they might be needed. Support healthcare waste handlers by training help to improve their knowledge, attitude and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare waste (HCW) is generated from hospitals or healthcare related facilities and is considered a major source of environmental contamination because it is made up of potentially harmful substances. In developing countries, especially Nigeria, management of HCW is becoming an issue of concern. The main objective of this study was to assess the current HCW management practices at two hospitals in Abuja, Nigeria. This cross-sectional study was conducted from June to July 2018 among randomly selected healthcare workers (HWs) practising at two hospitals in Abuja, Nigeria, using an electronic interviewer-administered questionnaire installed on a smartphone via an open data tool kit. We evaluated the waste segregation practices and assessed the knowledge of HWs regarding HCW in one public secondary and one private tertiary health facility. The status of waste management practice in the health facilities was carried out using the following criteria: waste management (responsibility, segregation, storage and packaging); waste transport; waste recycling and reuse; waste treatment and final disposal. Data gathered were analysed by performing descriptive statistics. Of the 105 health workers interviewed, 69 (65.7%) were females and mostly (44.8%) were within the age group 31-40 years. The proportion of respondents who had received specific training in the management of HCW was 17.1% (18/105). The level of HCW management practices in both facilities was found to be level 2: operating in a manner with some aspects that are considered sustainable. HCW management (HCWM) in Abuja is worth sustainable, especially in resource-limited settings. Hospital Management Board needs to ensure that measures needed to improve the HCWM at hospitals are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management of healthcare waste has gained wide attention in the recent years. This work reviews recent sustainable management of healthcare waste practices, the importance of legalizations, role of clinical waste producing bodies, emerging management trends, and treatment technologies. Furthermore, waste generated in the treatment processes and the health and environmental impacts of recent technologies are also examined. Sustainable assessment of technologies, to this point, revealed that in often cases, autoclave assisted with shredder could be a better alternative for the treatment of hazardous healthcare wastes while landfilling of healthcare waste received the lowest ranking. Studies are required to consider more reliable assessment methods for treatment technologies. This work can serve educators, researchers, as well as all the medical staff from nurses to doctors and volunteers who tirelessly contribute to the society in keeping people away from many diseases including the current global pandemic outbreak due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 through the best and most sustainable practices in medical waste management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assessment of the treatment technologies is a vital point for health care waste (HCW) management. The assessment process is regarded as a multi-attribute group decision-making problem. Considering individual knowledge backgrounds and psychological preferences, and various uncertainty factors which are difficult to describe numerical and precisely, experts often portray their individual assessments by employing qualitative expressions. Linguistic term with weakened hedge (LTWH) is an effective tool to quantify the qualitative information. Additionally, the Bonferroni mean (BM) can capture the interrelationship between input data and the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method could produce reliable outcomes. In this paper, we extend the BM operator into the LTWH environment and propose the linguistic term with weakened hedge BM (LTWHBM) operator and the weighted version, i.e., LTWHWBM, to depict the indeterminacy in the HCW management and cope with assessment of the treatment technology problems based on the developed novel operational rules of LTWHs. Various properties and special cases of these operators are investigated in detail. Furthermore, we design a LTWHWBM based CoCoSo group decision-making model, herein the LTWHWBM operator is employed to integrate individual experts' preferences and the extend CoCoSo method is utilized to yield the ranking of alternatives. Ultimately, a case study concerning the assessment of the HCW treatment technologies is performed. The feasibility and favorable characteristics of the established model are justified by the comparisons with several prevailing methodologies and sensitivity analyses. • New score function and partial order of LTWHs are presented. • New operations of LTWHs with good properties are defined. • An integrated method for qualitative group decision making is developed. • The method is testified in a case study regarding health care waste management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, together with the economic development, public health activities have gained substantial attention with increasing number of hospitals during the past decades. A multi-method approach involving site visits, questionnaires, and interviews, in combination with secondary data revealed that the healthcare waste (HCW) generation, varied with different specialties (general or pediatric/obstetric hospitals) and different level of hospitals (central, provincial, district levels). The HCW generation from different kinds of surveyed hospitals varied from 0.8 to 1.0 kg/bed/day for domestic waste, 0.15 to 0.25 kg/bed/day for infectious and hazardous waste, and less than 0.1 kg/bed/day for recycled waste. Only 94.3% of central hospitals, 92% of provincial hospitals, and 82% of district hospitals complied with national regulation in hazardous medical waste treatment. For healthcare wastewater treatment, the actual operating rates were 91%, 73%, and 50% for central, provincial, and district hospitals, respectively. The cost for HCW management accounted for only 10–15% of the total budget allocated for the medical facilities. Most of the provincial hospitals spent about $0.2–$0.4/bed/year for HCW management. This is the root cause of ineffective HCW management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, municipal authorities especially in the developing nations are battling to select the best health care waste (HCW) disposal technique for the effective treatment of the medical wastes during and post COVID-19 era. As evaluation of various disposal alternatives of HCW and selection of the best technique requires considering various tangible and intangible criteria, this can be framed as multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In this paper, we propose an assessment framework for the selection of the best HCW disposal technique based on socio-technical and triple bottom line perspectives. We have identified 10 criteria on which the best HCW disposal techniques to be selected based on extant literature review. Next, we use Fuzzy VIKOR method to evaluate 9 HCW disposal alternatives. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been demonstrated with a real-life case study in Indian context. To check the robustness of the proposed methodology, we have compared the results obtained with Fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution). The results help the municipal authorities to establish a methodical approach to choose the best HCW disposal techniques. Our findings indicate that incineration is the best waste disposal technique among the available alternatives. Even if the dataset indicates 'incineration' is the best method, we must not forget about the environmental concerns arising from this method. In COVID time, incineration may be the best method as indicated by the data analysis, but "COVID" should not be an excuse for causing "Environmental Pollution". • Health care waste disposal technique selection is a serious concern during COVID-19. • We propose Fuzzy VIKOR based method for selecting the best disposal technique. • This work has been grounded on Triple Bottom Line and Socio-Technical perspectives. • The proposed framework has been validated with a real-life case study. • The effectiveness of the proposed method has been compared with Fuzzy TOPSIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomedical waste management is getting significant consideration among treatment technologies, since insufficient management can cause danger to medicinal service specialists, patients, and their environmental conditions. The improvement of waste administration protocols, plans, and policies are surveyed, despite setting up training programs on legitimate waste administration for all healthcare service staff. Most biomedical waste substances do not degrade in the environment, and may also not be thoroughly removed through treatment processes. Therefore, the long-lasting persistence of biomedical waste can effectively have adverse impact on wildlife and human beings, as well. Hence, photocatalysis is gaining increasing attention for eradication of pollutants and for improving the safety and clearness of the environment due to its great potential as a green and eco-friendly process. In this regard, nanostructured photocatalysts, in contrast to their regular counterparts, exhibit significant attributes such as non-toxicity, low cost and higher absorption efficiency in a wider range of the solar spectrum, making them the best candidate to employ for photodegradation. Due to these unique properties of nanophotocatalysts for biomedical waste management, we aim to critically evaluate various aspects of these materials in the present review and highlight their importance in healthcare service settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]