Faulty handling of hospital waste: Municipal workers, scavengers at risk of contracting deadly diseases: expert

KARACHI: The dean of architecture and management sciences of the NED University of Engineering and Technology, Prof Dr Noman Ahmed, has said the municipal workers and scavengers in the city are prone to deadly infectious diseases as they handle the hospital waste daily without any safety precautions, much like the casual way the municipal garbage is handled in Karachi.

There is no separate handling on modern lines of around 1,100 tonnes of garbage generated by hospitals in Karachi daily as haphazard disposal of medical waste creates a serious public health risk.

Speaking at the National Waste Management Conference organised by the National Forum for Environment and Health (NFEH), he lamented that there is no check at all to stop scavengers from extracting useful and recyclable material from the hospital trash as this practice should come to an end to safeguard public health.

He said the hospital waste is quite often mixed with the regular municipal trash generated in the city instead of its disposal in a safe manner.

The senior academic who remained involved in different studies on waste management practices emphasised that hospital waste should be properly segregated before its disposal on a scientific basis.

He said the government should provide maximum resources and support for developing an efficient system of hospital waste disposal as unsafe practices in this regard had gravely compromised public health during the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Ahmed said that barring a few big private hospitals in Karachi, healthcare facilities don’t have any specialised system to handle their waste as their managements want this essential task to be carried out with minimal spending.

Zubair Ahmed Channa, managing director of the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB), told the audience that a very haphazard system had been present before the SSWMB had come into existence in 2014 for the disposal of 11,000 tonnes of municipal waste generated in Karachi daily.

He said the private contractors and scavengers who collected waste from different neighbourhoods of the city prior to the establishment of the SSWMB didn’t ensure that the trash collected by them ultimately reached Karachi’s two proper landfill sites because instead the garbage was thrown at various dumping points near residential localities.

He said that SSWMB had ensured that up to 9,000 tonnes of waste generated in Karachi daily reached the landfill sites as just a year ago only 3,000 tonnes of garbage had been reaching these sites for safe disposal.

Mr Channa said that he had been facing immense difficulties in convincing the residents of a number of residential localities and office-bearers of various industrial estates in Karachi not to depend any more on irregular private contractors for waste collection. Owing to improper handling and disposal of trash in Karachi it was difficult to utilise municipal waste for useful purposes like waste-to-energy and other recycling projects.

Wasif Ijlal, the CEO of Trans Karachi, said the Red Line BRTS (Bus Rapid Transport System) project being built in Karachi from Malir Halt to Numaish would generate minimal carbon emissions as it would operate on biogas to be generated by consuming dung available in Karachi’s Cattle Colony.

He said the Red Line BRTS would become operational in the next three years as it would resolve the issue of safe disposal of dung produced in the Cattle Colony, which is otherwise unsafely disposed of into the sea.

He said the use of biogas for the Red Line bus service would minimise its fuel cost as it would become the first BRTS in Pakistan that would require no subsidy from the government for its operations.

NFEH President Naeem Qureshi said that his non-governmental organisation had hosted the conference to find a lasting solution to the municipal and hazardous waste generated in Karachi for protecting the health of its citizens.

In his concluding remarks, Sindh Local Government Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah assured the audience that in the next few weeks a proper waste collection system of the SSWMB would be deployed in all districts of Karachi for daily collection and disposal of garbage.

He said that in the next step the SSWMB would unveil its waste disposal system in other major cities of Sindh after resolving the trash issue in Karachi. He said the Sindh government had the utmost resolve to make Karachi clean, green, and a fully developed city and for this purpose, its road and civic infrastructure would be rebuilt and overhauled as soon as monsoon rains ends.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022