The amount of waste from the IJsselland Hospital in Capelle aan den IJssel has increased by 500 percent due to the corona virus. Doctors and nurses in the corona ward have to change several times a day. To dispose of the waste that this produces, facility employees walk extra kilometers every day to collect all waste bins.
The used masks and aprons are stored separately in sealed buckets. Full waste bins are taken to a sea container, which is then sent to a waste processor in Dordrecht. There the buckets are gasified and incinerated.
“The waste may be contagious, we do not want another party to come into contact with it. That could be dangerous,” explains environmental coordinator of the hospital Monica Vriendts. Rijnmond.
The waste is given a special lid. “It will never come off. It also has to be clicked on in a special way. Suppose this barrel ends up in an accident, the lid will still remain on it.”
More than 100 trays per day
Dragan Dubajic and his colleagues now visit the hospital more often to collect the waste and to set up new buckets. The pedometers show that he and his colleagues now run about 22 kilometers every day, a little more than half a marathon.
“Normally it is about 25 containers a day. Now there are more than 100 daily,” says Dubajic. “That’s why we come here more often, about three or four times a day. If you only came by once a day, it would be packed here.”
The workload has thus increased, but Dubajic likes to do it. “You know what you’re doing it for. We like to do extra work for our healthcare staff.”
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