Coronavirus leaves China with mountains of medical waste
- More than 20 cities are struggling to dispose of the waste safely with Wuhan, the city at the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak, the worst affected
- City is producing more than 240 tonnes a day forcing authorities to deploy mobile treatment facilities
More than 20 cities across mainland China have been overloaded with medical waste, with Wuhan, the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak, producing up to six times more medical waste than usual, authorities said.
Medical waste treatment facilities in 28 other cities are working at full load, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment told a press conference on Wednesday, without specifying what the other cities were.
Hospitals in Wuhan, home to 11 million people and 80 per cent of those who died from Covid-19, produced more than 240 tonnes of medical waste daily during the peak of the outbreak, compared with 40 tonnes before the epidemic occurred, said Zhao Qunying, head of the ministry’s emergency office.
The central government has deployed 46 mobile medical waste treatment facilitates to the city, and built a new plant with a capacity of 30 tonnes within 15 days, said Zhao.
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“We have also upgraded facilities treating hazardous waste [to treat medical waste now],” he said.
The measures are designed to increase the city’s waste treatment capacity from 50 tonnes a day to over 263 tonnes.
The outbreak has infected more than 80,000 people and killed more than 3,000 people in China, and has since spread to more than 100 countries.
Zhao did not specify which other cities were overburdened or near full capacity, but inadequate medical waste treatment capabilities have been a long-standing issue in China.
Over 2 million tonnes of medical waste were produced in 2018, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
But 76 cities were unable to treat it in time, Hu Longhua, from the ministry’s solid waste and chemical management centre, told a forum that year.
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While the government suggests everyone wear a mask in public places to contain the spread of the virus, their use has added to the piles of medical waste to be disposed of.
Chinese manufacturers produced about 116 million a day by the end of last month, a 12-fold increase from the start of February, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planning agency.
It’s unclear how many of them are destroyed daily, but supply is still tight as most residents across the country can only buy a limited number from the government at a designated time.
Those generated by hospitals are treated as medical waste, which often goes to landfill or for incineration after sterilisation, Liu Lifeng, deputy head of the urban development department of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, told the conference.
Others are collected separately from those thought to be ill, while some are treated as household waste.
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