Dear community,

I'm currently undertaking research on the topic of industrial ecology / circular economy in Guatemala and Latin America, and found one interesting question related to the Covid19 crisis:

What is the suggested treatment and disposal of Covid-19-related medical wastes? And moreover, what are we supposed to do with facemasks, gloves and other disposable items which have been used by non-medical population (items which don't originate from hospitals or clinics).

I would like to add that incineration is not a common practice in Guatemala and Central America, and the rule of thumb disposal for a huge amount of non-medical material is landfilling.

My main issue is if at this point, the WHO and countries have enough criteria to implement the correct strategy for the two possible scenarios:

1. Covid-19-items which do not originate from hospitals or clinics DO NOT suppose a health risk because the virus dissapears easily and incineration/autoclave are not needed. Under this scenario, the Covid-19 items can be disposed as normal wastes to a landfill or other means of disposal.

2. Covid-19-items which do not originate from hospitals or clinics MUST be disposed as Medical Wastes because the virus could be spread by infecting people within activies such as the collection and classification of domestic wastes (e.g.), therefore appropriate incineration facilities should be prepared to correctly dispose not only items which comes from hospitals but also from homes.

If we end up choosing the wrong strategy, the implications would be this:

1. The virus would be spread and more people would be infected. It is very probable that the most infections would come from people handling garbage/waste from domestic and industrial facilities. Thus compromising the capacity of cities to get rid of infectious sources and wastes by accumulating these in their place of origin, leading to a potential outbreak of other diseases).

2. In case we find that everything should be disposed as medical wastes and find after that this was wrong, Governments, institutions and individuals will probably have already spent huge amounts of money and resources which were not needed.

Please if there's already an international agreement on what strategy should be taken, let me have some information about it. If there is still a discussion going on about this, please redirect me to the thread.

Thank you very much in advance

Julio Vargas, MEnv

Researcher

University of San Carlos, Guatemala