Mohtashami Zahra, Eshghi Kourosh, Khedmati Majid
Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Waste Manag Res. 2025 Jul 1:734242X251346025. doi: 10.1177/0734242X251346025.
The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) profoundly impacted the medical waste management system (MWMS). Nevertheless, there is a literature gap on dynamically examining how the disease outbreak affects this system. This article bridges the gap in theory and practice by presenting a novel system dynamics model for medical waste (MW) management. The proposed model includes disease outbreak and MW management sub-models for addressing the dynamic impacts of COVID-19 on waste generation and management patterns. In terms of theoretical contributions, the disease outbreak model consists of variables and interventions, including seasonal effects, hospital strain, public behaviour, personal protective equipment consumption, lockdown and vaccination. In addition, the MW management sub-model contributes to considering COVID-19 and non-COVID MW generation, waste management methods, carbon footprint generation and untreated MW accumulation. For implementing theoretical contributions in practice, the impacts of applying non-coercion social distancing, decreasing the death threshold, enhancing mask availability and coverage, earlier vaccination and lockdown implementation were assessed on the disease spread and consequently the MWMS. The case study of California provided managerial insights about how disease dynamics affect patterns of MW generation. Variation in waste generation patterns influenced the waste management methods, relevant environmental impacts and the risk of secondary infection by untreated MW. Finally, the impacts of MW treatment capacity expansion and district regulations on waste separation for increasing the share of recyclable materials were assessed on the amounts of accumulated untreated waste, the corresponding secondary infection risk, the amounts of landfilled waste and environmental impacts.
2019冠状病毒病（COVID-19）对医疗废物管理系统（MWMS）产生了深远影响。然而，在动态研究疾病爆发如何影响该系统方面存在文献空白。本文通过提出一种新颖的医疗废物（MW）管理系统动力学模型，填补了理论与实践之间的空白。所提出的模型包括疾病爆发和MW管理子模型，以解决COVID-19对废物产生和管理模式的动态影响。在理论贡献方面，疾病爆发模型由变量和干预措施组成，包括季节效应、医院压力、公众行为、个人防护装备消耗、封锁和疫苗接种。此外，MW管理子模型有助于考虑COVID-19和非COVID医疗废物的产生、废物管理方法、碳足迹产生和未处理医疗废物的积累。为了在实践中落实理论贡献，评估了应用非强制性社交距离、降低死亡阈值、提高口罩供应和覆盖率、提前接种疫苗和实施封锁对疾病传播以及MWMS的影响。加利福尼亚州的案例研究提供了关于疾病动态如何影响医疗废物产生模式的管理见解。废物产生模式的变化影响了废物管理方法、相关环境影响以及未处理医疗废物引发二次感染的风险。最后，评估了MW处理能力扩展和地区法规对废物分类以提高可回收材料份额的影响，包括未处理废物的累积量、相应的二次感染风险、填埋废物量和环境影响。
