Facts About Medical Sharps

Considered potentially infectious, medical sharps must adhere to the same regulations as medical waste. Improperly disposed sharps pose a health hazard to health care workers, waste haulers and landfill workers who may experience a needle stick. Used sharps, or needles, may transmit serious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis. According to the CDC, over 800,000 needle sticks are experienced by health care workers each year.

Individual Home Users

Outside of traditional health care facilities in the U.S., approximately nine million individual users will administer about three billion injections.

Most home users simply throw their needles away in household trash or flush them down the toilet. Needles in the trash pose a significant health risk of disease transmission to sanitation workers. The flushing of needles down the toilet can lead to needles washing ashore at our beaches.

Home users are encouraged to use alternative methods like drop-off or collection sites, mail-back programs, syringe exchange, or other at-home needle destruction devices.

Health Care Facilities

Medical sharps are any needle or similarly sharp or pointed object that has the potential to contain hazardous or infectious agents. All sharps are to be disposed of in accordance to FDA regulations in a container that can be closed, is puncture resistant, leak proof on the sides and bottom and affixed with the appropriate warning labels. In turn, these containers add a significant amount of weight in plastics to the medical waste stream.

Approximately 80 percent of medical sharps are plastic syringes and other injection devices. There are over 16 billion injections administered worldwide each year. Other plastics disposed of in sharps containers are vinyl tubing and bagging that often accompany these injection devices. The potential for contamination may be present and should be treated with care, even though there is no chance of puncture from these devices.

Roughly 10 percent of this waste is comprised of scalpels, blades, knives, scissors, or any other cutting instrument, used in a medical setting.

Glass from pipettes, Petri dishes, vials, and microscopic slides make up another 9 percent of medical sharp waste.

The remaining 1percent of sharp waste is benign paper and general waste from packaging that is inadvertently mixed.

Like other forms of medical waste, the main means of disposing sharp containers is through incineration. However, more economically and environmentally sound practices like on-site autoclaving (a sterilization method using high pressure and steam) are becoming more popular.