Australia’s medical waste market is still a bloody mess, but ideas for serious reform are bubbling up. Garth Lamb reports.

Last October, WME revealed Victorian businesses including funeral homes and medical clinics were kept in the dark as their clinical waste disposal contracts changed.

That article, A bloody mess: the state of clinical waste, also revealed regulators turning a blind eye to some of the nation’s most dangerous waste materials being carted from WA to lower-order disposal facilities in Victoria, and flagged problems with cross-border leakage “unfolding in SA”. Those problems have now come to a head, but so has a potential solution.

In February Transpacific Cleanaway informed Veolia, which had been incinerating about 700 bins of Adelaide’s medical waste a month, that it would instead send the waste to SteriHealth for disposal in Melbourne, starting March.

Veolia, which is due to open a new $9 million Adelaide incinerator in July, is predictably unhappy about losing 70 per cent of its clinical waste volume from the state. Like its competitors cited in the October article − SITA, Sweeny Todd and Ace Waste − Veolia is now questioning if environmental regulators are doing enough to keep the industry on a safe playing field.

Adelaide hospitals do not segregate clinical wastes as it has all been incinerated, until now. The assumption has to be that it is all contaminated with cytotoxic materials and requires the highest treatment – incineration.

WME contacted one of Transpacific’s key SA clients, the Royal Adelaide Hospital, which confirmed it had been informed of changes to its disposal point but maintained the disposal method didn’t change: “all of the medical waste is incinerated,” a spokesperson said, and there are “no changes required” or planned in relation to segregation.

WME contacted SteriHealth to confirm but only received a statement that the company “complies with all the regulatory requirements in the states that it operates [in]”.

It has two disposal options in Melbourne, a high-level incinerator believed to cost $0.80-$1.40/kg to operate and a newer ‘alternative treatment’ plant that shreds and chemically sterilises material for as little as $0.35/kg. Its competitors say there is little question which facility SteriHealth prefers to run, particularly if it also carries the cost of transporting waste from interstate.

SITA, which used to bury stabilised residuals from the chemical plant at its Taylors Rd landfill, in April banned receipt of any material from SteriHealth until the Victorian EPA or the company can confirm it doesn’t pose safety risks to SITA staff.

Assuming for a moment that all SA medical waste is incinerated, the question still remaining is why regulators are so comfortable with hazardous wastes being transported across state borders, despite suitable local treatment options?

Moving hazardous waste
The National Environment Protection Measure (NEPM) dealing with the Movement of Controlled Waste between States and Territories spells out the notification and tracking required when moving hazardous waste between jurisdictions.

It also puts the onus on the receiving state to determine whether waste meets its licensing requirements for treatment. It does not, however, require consideration of the risk to the community of hauling materials over long distances.

With a 10-year NEPM review underway, one suggestion is for an overhaul in line with the international Basel Convention on the movement of hazardous waste between countries. Basel has been in place since 1992 and effectively outlaws the movement of waste for purely economic reasons: the only justification for moving hazardous material is sound environmental outcomes compared to using local options.

Deakin University’s waste expert Trevor Thornton agrees “that philosophy is good”, but predicts implementation issues. What happens, for example, if a facility closes for maintenance? There would need to be a provision allowing interstate movement in that situation, but that potentially opens a loophole where operators could deliberately disable their facilities to use cheaper interstate plants.

There is no simple fix, but Thornton is “feeling more positive than I have for many years” about the prospects for real reform. The reason is the potential for the National Waste Policy (NWP), agreed at last November’s meeting of Australia’s environment ministers.

He said Biohazards Waste Industry Group, which has done a lot of work preparing standard definitions and principles, had a good hearing on its NWP submission. “Let’s just hope [the NWP] doesn’t get too bogged down in bureaucracy”.