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Managing biomedical Covid waste, a challenge for Swach workers
Citizens should sanitize their waste with sanitisers and hand it over once in a few days, in sealed bags and inform waste pickers that there are home quarantine patients living with them
With as many as 70 per cent asymptomatic Covid-19 affected patients home quarantined, there could be an alarming rise in the spread of the infection if the bio-medical waste and the garbage of the quarantined person is not dealt with properly.
Many of the housing societies have tied up with Swach for collecting their segregated waste but despite the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC)’s repeated appeal to residents and patients to segregate their Covid waste, it is not happening.
“Waste pickers are collecting from everyone at their risk; we are training them to handle such waste carefully. Citizens should sanitize their waste with sanitisers and hand it over once in a few days, in sealed bags and inform waste pickers that there are home quarantine patients living with them. These include masks, gloves, items contaminated with blood or body fluids should not be disposed with daily waste and must be given as biomedical waste to PMC, and we have informed waste pickers not to sort such waste for recycling,” said Harshad Barde, Swach.
Waste pickers have been infected over the year, according to Barde.
“Some have died but there is no confirmed knowledge of source of neither infection nor any specific case of transmission from citizens. Swach has raised support for PPE for every month since lockdown, gloves, masks, sanitisers, soaps five to six times more than the PPE received from PMC during the same period,” said Barde.
“We tell citizens when we find out that they should hand it over separately. Many citizens follow the rules but there are still some who just dump their Covid medical waste without telling us. They should be more careful, protecting us is protecting other citizens of the city,” Supriya Bhadakwad, waste picker.
Residents in NIBM said that the PMC van to collect Covid waste comes once a week.
“The Mukadam sends a message the previous day, so that our maids collect it from that household. We have requested the patient’s family to keep the waste at home, which is actually very little. Also, in case we need, he is willing to send the vehicle again,” said Maithily Manekwad, resident of NIBM.
In areas like Baner and Pashan, the PMC is not doing much to help pick up this waste.
Uma Tripathi who is home quarantined said, “The PMC is not picking up garbage, we have been following up and it is only false promises from their side. Garbage is being picked up every four to five days from houses in our society and it is kept in society premises for eight to 10 days.”
While the Pune ploggers resumed plogging drives after the first lockdown last year in the month of August, they were greeted with massive rise in open dumping of biomedical waste in the river body.
“More than 4,000 single-use masks were collected in the last six months while plogging. This is a serious concern because people have no idea about the disposal methods of biomedical waste. I raised an online petition to demand installation of mask and biomedical waste disposal bins. That helped us raise the concern at the right forum and talk about the issue. We are advising people to avoid disposal of such waste in the open and seeking help of sanitation workers of PMC,” said Vivek Gurav, Pune ploggers.
