Healthcare Waste Report - Environment Health

THEMATIC WORKING GROUP
ON SOLID AND HAZARDOUS
WASTE
Waste management has always been a
compounding issue faced by local and national
governments of all Asian countries, regardless
of their economic might. Both developed and
developing countries are forced to tackle
different issue at various stages of waste
management. For example, Asian developing
countries find difficulty in institutionalizing
waste segregation and collection, while the
developed ones, for example Singapore, find
difficulty in disposing the waste after proper
collection owing to limited land. Other issues
that threaten these countries arise in the forms
of drastic increase in waste volumes, regional
difference in waste composition, illegal
movement of waste resulting in transboundary
issues and lack of legal and financial
mechanisms for the proper implementation of
waste management programs.
Leaving aside the threats, disposal of the waste
as such has been an issue and in many
developing countries in Asia, open dumping is
the most preferred and prevalent method for
disposal often leading to environmental
problems such as water contamination, air
pollution, odour problems, health impacts,
and hygiene issues. In addition, heavy metal
contamination, increase of hazardous
substances in industrial waste, mixing of
infectious waste with municipal waste, and
environmental burden and health problems
derived from inappropriate treatment of ewaste
have been significant and emerging
issues to be tackled both at the regional and
national level in the continent.
Taking into account the multidimensional
issues originating from solid and hazardous
waste, the Thematic Working Group on Solid
and Hazardous Waste (TWGSHW) is assigned
to work towards addressing municipal solid
waste and medical waste issues. The
TWGSHW works in closely with the
CHAPTER 1_INTRODUCTION
environment and health ministries of
Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos,
Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Philippines,
Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The
TWGSHW functions with the objectives of,
1. Ensuring environmentally sound
management of solid and hazardous waste,
in particular municipal waste and medical
waste, and to promote the 3Rs in Southeast
and East Asian countries
2. Prioritizing issues by analyzing status-quo
of municipal waste and medical waste
management in the member countries
3. Providing useful information to raise
policymakers’ awareness on the importance
of, to increase investment addressing to,
and to mobilize bilateral and multilateral
assistance for the importance of linkages
between waste and health.
Though tasked with broader objectives of
ensuring appropriate management of solid
and hazardous waste in its member countries,
the TWGSHW first focused on the
management of healthcare waste (also
colloquially known as medical waste and often
interchangeably used) owing to its toxicity,
hazardous nature and rapidly growing
volumes. Often healthcare waste is referred to
as the rapidly growing priority waste streams
in many countries and is mostly mishandled
due to lack of knowledge and awareness on
the waste itself. Moreover, when providing
reasonable healthcare is itself an issue for
many developing Asian country governments,
appropriately addressing healthcare waste
appears to be too ambitious. However, proper
handling of healthcare waste cannot be
neglected citing any reason and it is rational to
introduce appropriate healthcare waste
management while the healthcare system is
itself being built.
With this background this reports elucidates
the fundamentals of healthcare waste
management and discuses the current situation
in the member countries of TWGSHW.
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