Christine Lawlor, the deputy radiopharmacy manager and a senior clinical technologist in nuclear medicine at Lincoln County Hospital, who has worked at the healthcare facility for over 10 years, reports on a scheme initiated last December which is seeing all recyclable waste removed from the radiopharmacy’s ‘offensive waste’ stream, in the process reducing costs, benefiting the environment, and contributing towards the sustainability goals of the NHS Carbon Reduction Strategy for England.
The issue of the disposal of waste produced in a radiopharmacy or a nuclear medicine department is a thorny one. The risk of inappropriate disposal and subsequent sanctions from the Environment Agency (EA) may led to the adoption of a policy that sees all waste treated as though it is contaminated with radioactivity, and therefore disposed of as clinical waste.
Prior to July 2013, all waste from the radiopharmacy at Lincoln County Hospital was disposed of as clinical waste in orange bags which went for incineration. In July 2013 the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULHT) introduced ‘tiger-striped’ bags for offensive waste, reducing the quantity of clinical waste by separating non-infectious waste from infectious waste. The radiopharmacy recycling project started in December 2013, removing recyclable waste from offensive waste.
The wider context
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