A preliminary life cycle assessment on healthcare waste management in Chittagong City, Bangladesh

Abstract

Life cycle assessment is a decision-supporting tool in waste management practice; however, very few researches have been performed on the evaluation of healthcare waste management based on life cycle perspective. So this preliminary life cycle assessment study was conducted on healthcare waste management in Chittagong city. Three scenarios were developed for the present healthcare waste management system based on previous data along with one proposed scenario. All the calculated values of each scenario were put into life cycle assessment database. Then the collected data were analyzed by adopting SimaPro 7 to calculate global warming, human toxicity, freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity and terrestrial ecotoxicity potential from healthcare waste management. Conducting a preliminary life cycle assessment study based on the present waste management scenarios in Bangladesh is very tough task. In contrary, there is a good prospect to conduct life cycle assessment study if appropriate implementation of the laws and technical supports can be ensured. It was found that open burning and incineration of healthcare waste mainly contributed to the global warming and human toxicity potential. Disposal of healthcare waste by dumping (landfilling) mainly contributed to the freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity and terrestrial ecotoxicity potential. The proposed scenario demonstrated remarkable lower impacts for each category than the private and local government healthcare waste management systems.