Healthcare waste management and treatment is one of the national priority tasks of China’s Tenth Five-Year Plan. Numerous installations disposing medical waste have already operated the project or under construction ...Healthcare waste management and treatment is one of the national priority tasks of China’s Tenth Five-Year Plan. Numerous installations disposing medical waste have already operated the project or under construction to the operation in 2006. This paper focuses on the assessment of existing and future options to handle medical waste (MW). Internationally available and so far in China applied technologies and management practice are analysed, including the problems how to segregate medical waste streams at the source and to reduce the ‘critical waste’ to mainly infectious and aesthetically sensible materials. Non-hazardous MW can be managed and treated in analogue to municipal solid waste (MSW). In most of the European countries decentralised hospital incinerators have been, because of high operation costs and pollution problems, widely banned and replaced by pre-treatment technologies at the source and centralised incineration plants for hazardous MW. Information for adapting and further developing MW management solutions and treatment technologies in China and applying the most appropriate MWM practice is provided.展开更多
文摘Healthcare waste management and treatment is one of the national priority tasks of China’s Tenth Five-Year Plan. Numerous installations disposing medical waste have already operated the project or under construction to the operation in 2006. This paper focuses on the assessment of existing and future options to handle medical waste (MW). Internationally available and so far in China applied technologies and management practice are analysed, including the problems how to segregate medical waste streams at the source and to reduce the ‘critical waste’ to mainly infectious and aesthetically sensible materials. Non-hazardous MW can be managed and treated in analogue to municipal solid waste (MSW). In most of the European countries decentralised hospital incinerators have been, because of high operation costs and pollution problems, widely banned and replaced by pre-treatment technologies at the source and centralised incineration plants for hazardous MW. Information for adapting and further developing MW management solutions and treatment technologies in China and applying the most appropriate MWM practice is provided.
