Waste Management System

Water Management System is all those activities and action required to manage waste from its inception to its final disposal. This includes amongst other things, collection, transport, treatment and disposal of waste together with monitoring and regulation. It also encompasses the legal and regulatory framework that relates to waste management encompassing guidance on recycling etc. The term usually relates to all kinds of waste, whether generated during the extraction of raw materials, the processing of raw materials into intermediate and final products, the consumption of final products, or other human activities, including municipal (residential, institutional, commercial), agricultural, and special (health care, household hazardous wastes, sewage sludge). Waste management is intended to reduce adverse effects of waste on heatlh, the environment or aesthetics. Waste management practices are not uniform among countries (developed, deployed and developing nations); regions (urban and rural area), and sectors (residential and industrial).

The importance of healthcare waste management in preserving the environment and protecting the public cannot be denied. Past research has dealt with various issues in healthcare waste management and disposal, which spreads over various journals, pipeline research disciplines and research communities. Hence, this article analyses this scattered knowledge in a systematic manner, considering the period between January 2005 and July 2014. The purpose of this study is to identify the trends in healthcare waste management literature regarding journals published main topics of research in healthcare waste management methodologies used in healthcare waste management research areas most frequently researched by researchers; and determine the scope of future research in healthcare waste management. To this end, the authors conducted a systematic review of 176 articles on healthcare waste management taken from the following eight esteemed journals: International Journal of Environmental Health Research, International Journal of Healthcare Quality Assurance, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Hazardous Material, Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management, Resources, Conservations and Recycling, Waste Management, and Waste Management & Research. The authors have applied both quantitative and qualitative approaches for analysis, and results will be useful in the following ways results will show importance of healthcare waste management in healthcare operations; findings will give a comparative view of the various publications study will shed light on future research areas.

There has been a tremendous rise worldwide in the amount of healthcare waste (HCW) generated over the last few years owing to increase in population, number and size of healthcare facilities, and use of disposable medical products (Mohee, 2005). HCW today poses grave challenges to hospitals and medical institutions (Naito, 1987), especially in developing nations where medical waste (MW) is very often combined with municipal waste, threatening the health and safety of the handling staff, general public and the environment. Owing to these reasons, researchers have, over the past few years, turned their attention to finding ways to manage HCW (Askarian et alm, 2004: Talebbeydokhti and Kreandmand, 2006). Jang et al (2006) defined HCW as whole waste generated by hospitals, including infectious and non-infectious waste, chemicals, hazardous and non-hazardous material