The COVID-19 pandemic instantly increased demand for some types of medical waste management, such as the disposal of personal protective equipment and testing supplies. Waste management companies met this challenge last year, but it required a lot of flexibility, they said. This year, health care providers have to dispose millions of needles and empty vaccine vials. But a shortage of sharps containers, the plastic buckets in which clinicians throw away old syringes and vials, is […]

The increase in the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) and its use during the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a rise in medical waste as institutions dispose of gowns, gloves, masks, face shields and shoe covers that have been exposed to the virus. “There definitely is more regulated medical waste being generated, and a lot of it is derived from PPE,” said Rudy Vingris, the health care business development manager at Waste Management Sustainability Services. […]

In any given year, vaccines are given out and needles and syringes have to be disposed of. But what about this year? How much excess medical waste is created by COVID-19 vaccinations? In short, it’s a lot. Naomi Friesz, a nurse, has been doling out shots on the frontlines since they were made available. She said Bismarck-Burleigh Public Health, alone, has given out thousands, likely tens of thousands more doses this year than any other […]

According to a survey done in 2017, which is conducted on a large sample of Americans by Consumer ­Reports, about 30% of Americans did not clean out their medicine cabinets for over a year and nearly 20% have not done so in the last 3 years. Additionally, most Americans do not know how to clean their medicine cabinets correctly. Those unused and expired medicines not only add clutter to our closets but also may cause […]

Good news: the COVID-19 vaccine schedule is moving along in the U.S. and expected to pick up substantially very soon. Over 80 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered from December 2020 until mid-March 2021, and the Biden administration is aiming to see that three million vaccines are administered per day by April. But a rapid ramp-up will mean a tsunami of vaccine-related waste, mainly needles. There are similarities in how this material and other […]

An unintended consequence of COVID-19 safety procedures has been a surge in trash, from face masks to gloves to, now, the discarded syringes and needles from COVID-19 vaccines. If laid end to end, the needles from the number of vaccine doses needed to inoculate the entire U.S. population—about 660 million—would create enough waste to wrap around the Earth 1.8 times, according to OnSite Waste Technologies, a medical waste disposal company. It’s certainly worthwhile trash to […]

Tanveer Adyel began to notice the trash in March. This was early in the COVID-19 pandemic. He saw latex gloves and blue, disposable masks littering his garden and street. Other types of personal protective equipment, or PPE, including face shields, were also among the trash. Soon, he spotted lots of thin plastic bags from grocery stores. Those bags had been banned in his state the previous year. Adyel is an engineer at Monash University in […]

The increase in the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) and its use during the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a corresponding burden on the other end: a rise in medical waste as institutions dispose of gowns, gloves, masks, face shields and shoe covers that have been exposed to the virus. Are there different waste disposal requirements for COVID-19-contaminated PPE? How should your pharmacy and institution be handling this kind of waste? “While we have not […]