The origin of the novel human coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its potential for harm increased face mask and medical waste in the environment, thereby necessitating the urgent prevention and control of the pandemic. The article estimates the face mask and medical waste generation in Asia during the pandemic to convince the waste management and scientific communities to find ways to address the negative impact that the waste disposal has on the environment. Standardisation, procedures, guidelines and strict implementation of medical waste management related to COVID-19, community habitats and public areas should be carefully considered to reduce pandemic risks in hospitals, as proper medical waste disposal effectively controls infection sources.

Face Mask and Medical Waste Disposal during the Novel COVID-19 Pandemic in Asia

The outbreak of an epidemic disease may pose significant treats to human beings and may further lead to a global crisis. In order to control the spread of an epidemic, the effective management of rapidly increased medical waste through establishing a temporary reverse logistics system is of vital importance. However, no research has been conducted with the focus on the design of an epidemic reverse logistics network for dealing with medical waste during epidemic outbreaks, which, if improperly treated, may accelerate disease spread and pose a significant risk for both medical staffs and patients. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel multi-objective multi-period mixed integer program for reverse logistics network design in epidemic outbreaks, which aims at determining the best locations of temporary facilities and the transportation strategies for effective management of the exponentially increased medical waste within a very short period. The application of the model is illustrated with a case study based on the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China. Even though the uncertainty of the future COVID-19 spread tendency is very high at the time of this research, several general policy recommendations can still be obtained based on computational experiments and quantitative analyses. Among other insights, the results suggest installing temporary incinerators may be an effective solution for managing the tremendous increase of medical waste during the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, but the location selection of these temporary incinerators is of significant importance. Due to the limitation on available data and knowledge at present stage, more real-world information are needed to assess the effectiveness of the current solution.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/5/1770/pdf

Reverse Logistics Network Design for Effective Management of Medical Waste in Epidemic Outbreaks: Insights from the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Outbreak in Wuhan (China)

Health-care waste (HCW) management is a high priority public health and environmental concern particularly in developing countries. The decision to select an optimal technology for the disposal of HCW is a complicated multi-criteria decision analysis problem involving both qualitative and quantitative factors. Evaluating HCW treatment technologies may be based on imprecise information or uncertain data. Moreover, there can be significant dependence and feedbacks between the different dimensions and criteria. However, most existing decision models for HCW cannot capture these complex interrelationships. In response, this paper proposes a novel hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) model by integrating the 2-tuple DEMATEL technique and fuzzy MULTIMOORA method for selection of HCW treatment alternatives. It makes use of modified 2-tuple DEMATEL for obtaining the relative weights of criteria and fuzzy MULTIMOORA for assessing the alternatives according to each criterion. Specifically, an empirical case in Shanghai, one of the largest cities in China, is provided to illustrate the potential of the new model. Results show that the proposed framework for evaluating HCW treatment technologies is effective and provides meaningful implications for engineering designers to refer.

Wang Guanxing

Papers

Medical waste management in China: a case study of Nanjing.