Healthcare Waste Management

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Overview
Summary / Key takeaways
Supporting Resources

Summary / Key takeaways

Healthcare waste management is an essential component of safe, sustainable, and high-quality care. Healthcare facilities generate large volumes of waste every day, including general waste, biomedical waste, pharmaceutical waste, hazardous materials, and sharps. While only a small proportion of healthcare waste requires specialized treatment, improper segregation often results in unnecessary incineration or sterilization, increasing costs, greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental pollution. Evidence suggests that up to 85% of healthcare waste can be safely managed through general waste, recycling, or composting streams when correctly segregated. Improving waste management therefore represents a major opportunity to reduce environmental impacts while maintaining patient and staff safety.

Sustainable waste management requires clear understanding of waste categories, regulations, and treatment methods such as autoclaving, hydroclaving, microwaving, and incineration. Practical tools support change by helping organizations strengthen waste segregation practices, conduct waste audits, update internal policies, and reduce overall waste generation through approaches such as reuse, reprocessing, recycling, and the “10 Rs” framework.

Successful implementation depends on staff education, leadership support, collaboration with waste vendors and local partners, and embedding sustainable waste practices into everyday clinical and operational workflows. Exploring practical resources, case studies, and implementation tools can help healthcare teams identify realistic opportunities to improve waste management, reduce environmental harm, and support safer, more sustainable systems of care.

Playbook: Navigating biomedical waste management policies for sustainability

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Suggested Citation:

Machane S, MacLeod C, Lam I. Navigating Biomedical waste management policies for sustainability. Version 1.1. [Internet]. CASCADES; 2024 [cited DATE]. Available from: https://cascadescanada.ca/.

Supporting Resources

Sustainability-Embedded Quality Improvement

This playbook introduces the SE-QI framework and provides background information, resources, and considerations for embedding sustainability in healthcare improvement projects. It was developed in collaboration with key partners and experts in QI across Canada. It serves as a resource for clinicians, health care professionals, students, trainees, and decision-makers involved in QI work, aiming to inform them of: Sustainability-Embedded Quality Improvement (SE-QI) positions quality improvement (QI) as a practical pathway for embedding sustainability within clinical and operational practice. This playbook introduces the SE-QI framework and provides background information, resources, and considerations for embedding sustainability in healthcare improvement projects. It was developed in collaboration with key partners and experts in QI across Canada. It serves as a resource for clinicians, health care professionals, students, trainees, and decision-makers involved in QI work, aiming to inform them of: Why SE-QI is an essential and practical approach to quality improvement in healthcare, What tools are available to support planning and implementation, and how to effectively implement SE-QI into practice to advance high-quality, low-carbon, resilient healthcare.

Playbook