University of Chichester Business School, Bognor Regis Campus, Upper Bognor Road, Bognor Regis, West Sussex, PO21 1HR, UK.
School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.
Environ Monit Assess. 2018 Oct 27;190(11):678. doi: 10.1007/s10661-018-7063-y.
Proper management of healthcare wastes is a key concern across resource-constrained countries in South Asia. Existing scientific research on this topic usually involves epidemiological and behavioral studies. Similarly, environmental impact assessment of healthcare wastes is mainly conducted from an end-user or anthropocentric point of view. In this study, we took a novel approach by analyzing healthcare wastes using an ecocentric position. Here, we utilize a case study of a general public hospital in a major city of Pakistan to analyze the embodied energy of its waste fractions by category. We used Emergy analysis to assess the true economic potential of recycling these waste items. While doing so, we compared the economic potential of current waste recycling practices with the scenario of 100% recycling of useful waste fractions. We discovered that the latent embodied energy of different recyclable waste fractions made them far more valuable than their existing market prices indicate. This value increased further if the useful waste fractions were completely recycled. In conclusion, this study used empirical evidence to argue in favor of source-segregation and recycling of healthcare wastes so that the higher costs associated with natural resource extraction and processing can be avoided. Future studies considering hazardous healthcare wastes can use the approach taken in this paper to analyze the impact of other practical waste treatment procedures.
妥善处理医疗废物是南亚资源有限国家的一个主要关注点。现有关于这一主题的科学研究通常涉及流行病学和行为研究。同样，医疗废物的环境影响评估主要是从最终用户或人类中心的角度进行的。在这项研究中，我们采用了一种新颖的方法，从生态中心的角度分析医疗废物。在这里，我们利用巴基斯坦一个主要城市的一家综合公立医院的案例研究，按类别分析其废物部分的蕴含能。我们使用生态能分析来评估回收这些废物项目的真实经济潜力。在这样做的过程中，我们将当前废物回收实践的经济潜力与 100%回收有用废物部分的情况进行了比较。我们发现，不同可回收废物部分的潜在蕴含能使它们的价值远远高于其现有市场价格所表明的价值。如果完全回收有用的废物部分，这一价值还会进一步增加。总之，本研究使用经验证据支持对医疗废物进行源头分类和回收，以避免与自然资源提取和加工相关的更高成本。未来考虑危险医疗废物的研究可以使用本文所采用的方法来分析其他实际废物处理程序的影响。
