The COVID-19 pandemic is generating tons of medical waste

Garbage contaminated with bodily fluids or other infectious materials is becoming a bigger concern for hospitals as they brace for a surge in patients sick with COVID-19 in the US. Patients and health care workers are quickly going through medical supplies and disposable personal protective equipment, like masks. Eventually all that used gear piles up as medical waste that needs to be safely discarded. In Wuhan, where the novel coronavirus first emerged, officials didn’t just need to build new hospitals for the influx of patients; they had to construct a new medical waste plant and deploy 46 mobile waste treatment facilities too.

Hospitals there generated six times as much medical waste at the peak of the outbreak as they did before the crisis began. The daily output of medical waste reached 240 metric tons, about the weight of an adult blue whale. There’s already been an uptick of garbage from personal protective equipment in the US, according to medical waste company Stericycle, which handled 1. 8 billion pounds of medical waste globally in 2018.

And some things that aren’t usually considered medical waste, like food, now need to be handled more carefully after coming in contact with a COVID-19 patient. Stericycle didn’t provide numbers for how much of an increase it’s seeing so far, adding that it believes it has the capacity to handle the swell and may add shifts to the company’s 50 treatment centers in the US if necessary. Additionally, the drop in elective surgeries might offset some of the rise in waste we’re seeing from the pandemic, a spokesperson for Stericycle tells The Verge. “It’s a rapidly changing environment right now and forecasting volumes is challenging,” Stericycle Vice President of Corporate Communications Jennifer Koenig wrote in an email to The Verge.

“We are closely monitoring the situation with all relevant agencies to determine next steps. ” The CDC says that medical waste from COVID-19 can be treated the same way as regular medical waste. Regulations on how to treat that waste vary by location and can be governed by state health and environmental departments, as well as by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Department of Transportation. Generally, to make sure contaminated trash from health care facilities doesn’t pose any harm to the public before going to a landfill, it’s typically burned, sterilized with steam, or chemically disinfected.