Tata Memorial Hospital first in India to install autoclave

Infectious waste, including swabs, tissues, bloody bandages, find their way into bright yellow bins. They are then emptied into the autoclave machine, sterilised and crushed in the shredder. The biggest plus of the entire process is that it reduces the volume and weight of the collected waste by 80 percent.

Tata Memorial gave waste management a good look around three years back, after they received a letter from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation asking them to clean up their act. “Accusing us of promoting ragpickers in the area, they asked us to do something about our waste,” explains Dr Rohini Kelkar, Head of the Department of Microbiology and in-charge of the waste management programme. “We were already working on hospital infection control and following the letter, we extended it to waste management.”

Tata Memorial, like most other hospitals, invested in an incinerator, which was installed in 1994. But it didn’t work out. “Basically it is a failure as a technology,” says Kelkar. “It didn’t work out. We are medical people and couldn’t handle that equipment. We stopped using it two years after it was installed.”

While the hospital looked at the options they had, the CPCB was pushing for a law on hospital waste management. While the CPCB’s efforts paid off last year, Tata Memorial took alittle while longer to get their system working.

Waste management man S A Dicholkar says: “Earlier, it was impossible to walk anywhere near this dump site. There was heaps of garbage and the clearance by BMC was not very regulated. Now, not only is this place sparkling, even the disposal is easy because of the reduction in volume of the waste. Also, neighbourhood residents and the staff work in a safer, cleaner environment.”