A Study on Biomedical Waste Management in Chittoor District

Abstract

Chittoor District is famous for renowned temples like Sri Venkateswara Swamy temple at Tirumala, Tiruchnoor, Sriklalahasti and Kanipakam. In Chittoor district is having around 9800 beds serving the medical needs of the people. The biomedical waste is segregated and temporally stored in blue, yellow and red color-coded bags. The non-infectious waste such as glove papers, plastic papers, covers and suture covers are put in blue bags yellow bag contains contaminated cotton swabs, gloves, mops, gauze, specimens, patient’s wastage, catheters, I.V. and blood set, suction tubes, urine bags and all draining tubes which are solid and liquid in nature. Human or animal tissues, organs or body parts that are highly infectious are collected and in red bags. The quantity of biomedical waste generated from the hospitals is about 1300 kg/day. Daily all these wastes are collected from all the hospitals and transported to the biomedical waste management plant which is located 25 km away from Tirupati. All these waste is incinerated in a dual-chamber incinerator of 100 kg/h capacity working for 8–10 h/day. The incinerator consists of primary chamber operated at temperature of 800–850 °C and secondary chamber operated at 1000–1100 °C. The incinerator is attached with attendant air pollution control facilities like a cyclone followed by a scrubber. The ash from the incinerator is buried in the landfill. The stack emissions and ash from the incinerator were analyzed for its leaching potential. The problem encountered during incineration, especially of waste components like placenta, etc., are also discussed in the paper.