Once medical wastes are discarded by healthcare facilities, they are collected by waste removal services and taken to the processing plant where they are treated and processed. This ensures the proper destruction of microbes and bacteria that might be there in the waste.
Many of you must be wondering what are medical waste disposal treatment methods. In this post, we will give you a brief idea about how medical wastes are treated.
Methods of Medical Waste Treatment
The main methods of treating medical wastes include the following:
- Incineration
This is a controlled way of burning medical wastes, so that all the remaining bacteria and microbes are destroyed. The wastes are burned inside an incinerator and therefore, the process is called incineration.
Although this is an age-old method, it is very effective. Maybe this is why, it is still practiced today. However, incinerators have received a lot of backlash because they are known to cause heavy air pollution.
- Autoclaves
Autoclaves are basically confined chambers where medical wastes are sterilised with the help of heat, steam and pressure. This method is used to sterilise all the medical equipment, so that they can be used again. For instance, wastes like surgical clamps and knives are put into autoclaves.
Autoclaves chambers help to destroy microorganisms in the waste. The good thing about using autoclaves is that they are chemical-free. unlike incinerators, they do not give off gas or pollute the air.
- Microwave
This is a radiation method of treating medical waste. However, this method can be applied only to waste that has water in it. That’s because the radiation directly works on the liquid and not on the solid wastes.
It is because of this reason that microwave units are often applied with humidifiers. The best thing about microwave methods is that they are very cost-effective.
So these are some of the medical waste treatment methods. However, it is always not easy to manage medical waste as you have to face a lot of problems. If you are wondering what are the problems with medical waste disposal, then you should know that health risk tops the list.