What does the color of a medical waste bag tell you?
Garbage bins are often color-coded to make segregation of waste easy for everyone. However, in a hospital setting, the purpose of this is to indicate a specific classification of waste so that it can keep the public and environment safe and protected from infectious diseases and other hazardous waste materials.
This is also important in terms of waste management to ensure that the medical wastes are properly segregated, transported, treated, and disposed of by the Treatment, Storage, and Disposal (TSD) Facilities.
As a guide, the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) assigned colors to six types of medical waste generated by both healthcare facilities and households.
Types of Medical Waste
RED contains sharp materials that can cause a cut or puncture wounds. According to the Health Care Waste Management Manual of the Department of Health (DOH), “Whether or not they are infected, such items are usually considered as highly hazardous health care waste.”
Examples of sharp materials are needles or syringe, scalpel blades, ampules, test tubes, broken glasses, and capillary tubes.
GREEN contains biodegradable wastes like leftover food, used cooking oil, fish entrails, scale, fins, fruits, vegetable peelings, rotten fruits, and vegetables.
ORANGE contains radioactive wastes or medical equipment contaminated or exposed in radioactivity. The Health Care Waste Management specified items such as disused sealed radiation sources, liquid and gaseous materials contaminated with radioactivity, excreta of patients who underwent radionuclide diagnostic and therapeutic applications, and tap water washings of such paraphernalia.
BLACK contains non-biodegradable wastes like paper or paper products (newspaper, tetra packs, etc.), bottles (glass and plastics), and packaging materials (Styropor, candy wrapper, aluminum cans).
YELLOW WITH BLACK BAND contains pharmaceutical and chemical wastes such as defective thermometer, busted fluorescent bulb, and empty bottles of acids, betadine, iodine, alcohol, anesthetic, and laboratory reagents.
YELLOW contains infectious and pathological wastes such as used test strips, used beads or plates, used reaction pads or foils, used swabs, used gloves, used cord clamp, used plaster, used masks.
This type of medical wastes is also the ones generated from the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Information is key
Awareness of the contents of medical waste bags is one step to a person's protection from the danger of the pandemic.
Furthermore, this guide can also be relevant in places outside medical facilities, like your homes. Family relatives infected with COVID-19 who are under self-quarantine produces infectious waste that if not properly disposed of may expose those handling it to infection.
Segregating healthcare wastes like personal protective equipment (PPE) can prevent contamination with other household wastes.
Proper segregation will also warn the garbage disposal personnel that the color-coded bags are hazardous or harmful and must be handled and disposed of in a proper way.
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