Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore   

Biomedical waste disposal still shoddy

Special Correspondent

Poor monitoring blamed `Waste is secretly placed in lorries for transportation to the yard'

COIMBATORE: Three days after the Coimbatore Corporation Council expressed its resentment over biomedical waste disposal, charges of unsafe dumping at the compost yard in Vellalore continue to pour in.

The Council stepped up the demand for close monitoring and stringent action against errant hospitals. On Thursday, the Kurichi-Vellalore Pollution Prevention Action Committee charged a hospital in Gandhipuram with attempts to have its hazardous waste taken to the yard. The committee claimed that its members spotted sacks of bio-medical waste kept ready for being loaded on to a lorry.

"We have been gathering information on the timings at various hospitals when such waste is secretly placed in the lorries and covered with other garbage for transportation to the yard," K. S. Mohan, secretary of the committee, said. "Two sacks were already in the lorry and four others were kept ready for loading."

"We informed the Corporation's sanitary officials. But the sacks were removed by the time they arrived," he said.

"We came to know that between 9.30 a.m. and 10 a.m. biomedical waste is being taken from three hospitals in this area. We decided to check this out at the point of loading itself."

Mr. Mohan said the episode on Thursday proved that hospitals continued to put people at risk by reckless dumping of biomedical waste.

"We met Corporation officials at the Mayor's office after the incident to keep him apprised of what had happened."

The committee said the situation at the yard revealed that most of the hospitals in the city did not have any facility for safe disposal of the infectious waste despite claims from them that they did not resort to unsafe dumping.

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