Guidance In Developing National And Or Regional Strategies For The Environmentally Sound Management Of Hazardous Wastes

The fundamental aims of the Basel Convention are the reduction of the transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and environmentally sound management of such wastes. This document provides guidelines in developing national or regional strategies for the environmentally sound management of hazardous wastes.--Publisher's description.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002 brought together thousands of delegates who mapped out the future of the global sustainable development agenda. The resulting technical document, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI), identifies priorities in the implementation of Agenda 21 and other international agreements, and commitments that will take these priorities forward. This plain language version provides an invaluable reference to the outcomes of the WSSD by explaining the JPOI clearly for the lay person and expert alike.

"This training manual has been developed to assist with the preparation of a national environmentally sound management plan for polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs) and PCB contaminated equipment. It is designed in the context of The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, which entered into force in 1992."--Publisher's description.

In June 2012 the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development adopted, as part of the main outcome document, The Future we Want, a call for countries to develop and enforce comprehensive national and local waste management policies, strategies, laws, and regulations. This call was a response to the challenges presented by unsustainable production and consumption, including the clear and unavoidable evidence of that unsustainability in the generation of waste. Increasingly, that challenge will come to be faced most acutely in developing countries. The objective of this guidance document is to help countries respond to that call: to develop and implement national waste management strategies, or, if they already have such strategies, to help them review, revise and update them.

This is the second edition of the WHO handbook on the safe, sustainable and affordable management of health-care waste--commonly known as "the Blue Book". The original Blue Book was a comprehensive publication used widely in health-care centers and government agencies to assist in the adoption of national guidance. It also provided support to committed medical directors and managers to make improvements and presented practical information on waste-management techniques for medical staff and waste workers. It has been more than ten years since the first edition of the Blue Book. During the intervening period, the requirements on generators of health-care wastes have evolved and new methods have become available. Consequently, WHO recognized that it was an appropriate time to update the original text. The purpose of the second edition is to expand and update the practical information in the original Blue Book. The new Blue Book is designed to continue to be a source of impartial health-care information and guidance on safe waste-management practices. The editors' intention has been to keep the best of the original publication and supplement it with the latest relevant information. The audience for the Blue Book has expanded. Initially, the publication was intended for those directly involved in the creation and handling of health-care wastes: medical staff, health-care facility directors, ancillary health workers, infection-control officers and waste workers. This is no longer the situation. A wider range of people and organizations now have an active interest in the safe management of health-care wastes: regulators, policy-makers, development organizations, voluntary groups, environmental bodies, environmental health practitioners, advisers, researchers and students. They should also find the new Blue Book of benefit to their activities. Chapters 2 and 3 explain the various types of waste produced from health-care facilities, their typical characteristics and the hazards these wastes pose to patients, staff and the general environment. Chapters 4 and 5 introduce the guiding regulatory principles for developing local or national approaches to tackling health-care waste management and transposing these into practical plans for regions and individual health-care facilities. Specific methods and technologies are described for waste minimization, segregation and treatment of health-care wastes in Chapters 6, 7 and 8. These chapters introduce the basic features of each technology and the operational and environmental characteristics required to be achieved, followed by information on the potential advantages and disadvantages of each system. To reflect concerns about the difficulties of handling health-care wastewaters, Chapter 9 is an expanded chapter with new guidance on the various sources of wastewater and wastewater treatment options for places not connected to central sewerage systems. Further chapters address issues on economics (Chapter 10), occupational safety (Chapter 11), hygiene and infection control (Chapter 12), and staff training and public awareness (Chapter 13). A wider range of information has been incorporated into this edition of the Blue Book, with the addition of two new chapters on health-care waste management in emergencies (Chapter 14) and an overview of the emerging issues of pandemics, drug-resistant pathogens, climate change and technology advances in medical techniques that will have to be accommodated by health-care waste systems in the future (Chapter 15).