The increasing proportion of medical wastes is posing momentous public health and environmental issues across the world. Medical waste can be contagious, contain toxic chemicals, and pose a contamination threat to both people and the environment. If patients are to obtain healthcare and retrieve in safe surroundings, waste must be disposed of safely. The management of the waste from health services is complicated, and to be successful, it must be understood and addressed by everyone working in health services from those washing the floors to the senior administrators. The key technologies for medical waste management include steam sterilization, advanced steam sterilization, microwave treatment, dry heat sterilization, alkaline hydrolysis, biological treatment, and plasma gasification.
Steam sterilization or autoclaving is the most common alternative treatment method. Among alternative systems, autoclaving has the lowest capital costs and can be used to process up to 90 percent of medical waste, and are easily scaled to meet the needs of any medical organization. On the other hand, advanced steam treatment technologies combine steam treatment with vacuuming, internal mixing or fragmentation, internal shredding, drying, and compaction, thus leading to volume reduction. Simultaneously, microwave treatment is also a promising technology in which treatment occurs through the introduction of moist heat and steam generated by microwave energy. The microwave units generally have higher capital costs than autoclaves and can be batch or semi-continuous.
Further, plasma gasification is an emerging solution for medical waste management. A plasma gasifier is an oxygen-starved reactor that is operated at the very high temperatures, which results in the breakdown of wastes into hydrogen, carbon monoxide, water, etc. Therefore, organizations should embrace these technologies and concentrate more on disinfection or sterilization of hazardous medical wastes at the point of generation.
MD Tech Review has compiled a list of top 10 medical waste management service providers to help healthcare professionals navigate seamlessly through the market highly cluttered with technology products and solutions. With several innovative technological capabilities and success stories up their sleeves, each medical waste management service providers in the list continue to prove their mettle in the field of medical waste management. We hope this issue of MD Tech Review helps you build the partnership you and your firm need to foster a technologically-driven environment.
We present to you MD Tech Review’s “Top 10 Medical Waste Management Consulting/Service Companies - 2020.”
