Eco-economics Approach for Non-infectious Medical Waste Emergency Disposal During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

After the outbreak of COVID-19, it spread rapidly all over the world. A large number of infected patients have led to a sharp increase in medical waste. This puts great pressure on the medical waste treatment system. The disposal capacity of the system may not be able to meet such a large amount of medical waste, which may lead to delayed treatment of infectious medical waste (IMW) and accumulation of non-infectious medical waste (NMW). Therefore, this paper proposes that it is necessary to classify IMW and NMW, and reconstruct the domestic waste disposal plant to treat NMW to alleviate the pressure of the treatment system. This paper also establishes an eco-economics model to optimize the emergency disposal scheme. The effectiveness of the model is verified by a real case in Wuhan. It is found that the location and carbon emission coefficient of the domestic waste disposal plants are the key factors affecting its selection. At the same time, sufficient budget may lead to waste money. In addition, carbon emission and total cost always change in the opposite trend when the budget changes. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.