Animals and nature are incredibly important, it is safe to say that only a monster would disagree here. We need these things to hold our ever more fragile ecosystem together in an increasingly destabilized ecological world. We are concerned about many things disrupting or continuing to disrupt our planet’s health. We march through streets over global warming and we recycle our paper, plastic, and metal. We turn off the lights when we leave a room and make every effort to use public transportation, avoiding toxic emissions. It is clear thought that many of these efforts are simply drops in the bucket and that regulations need to be enacted in order to fortify real results from our collective work. This is true in no single issue more clearly than in medical waste management, an area where we as individuals have precious little control.
It has been shown that when left to their own devices a number of companies would thwart proper medical waste disposal in favor of saving a little bit of money. This may not seem like an environmental concern exactly but it most certainly is. When syringes and blood bags are disposed of improperly it is rarely in a densely populated urban area. There it would become far too easy to catch the scourge who was so inept or so callous as to dump waste freely. Instead, this toxic material is strewn about wooded areas where animals roam freely and can end up on the wrong side of some potentially poisonous unused medicine or bloody gauze. Regulated medical waste is flushed into rivers and oceans where it is unwillingly ingested by fish and other sea life. Toxic material becomes toxic meals for animals and many will not survive the wasteful and heartless attack on their homes. Meanwhile, the business people responsible for these dumps of what is supposed to be regulated medical waste sit on top of piles of money never engaged with the damage they have done. Read the rest of this entry »
