Determination and Evaluation of the Rate of Solid Wastes Generation in Health Care Centers in Montevideo, Uruguay

Decree 586/009 establishes the main guidelines related to the management of Health Care Wastes (RAS). For this reason, it is used as a reference in the definition of any methodological proposal that intends to address all the aspects related to Intra-institutional Management of Residues generated in Health Care Centers (CAS) in Uruguay. In the first instance, this paper presents an application case based on the experience of previous work in a CAS in Montevideo. Providing special importance to the Evaluation of rates of sanitary waste removal rates in the hospital centers, which were determined based on historical data for the period from 2008 to 2011, referring to rates of removal of contaminated, common and recyclable sanitary waste. Based on the analysis of these data, information on their behavior is obtained, such as: number of common waste removed per day in the period, evolution of the monthly average of the daily rate of removal of common waste, evolution of the average daily waste removal rate from month to month in the period, average daily waste removal rate for each month of the year in the period considered, average daily rate of common waste removal for each day of the week, evolution of the monthly average of the daily rate of removal of contaminated waste, evolution of the monthly average daily withdrawal rate of contaminated waste in the period and mean of the daily rate of removal of contaminated waste for each month of the year in the period considered. Finally, the conclusions of this article present the procedure to perform a weighing campaign, which should be carried out to determine the common and contaminated waste generation rates in each of the main services of the CAS.