HYDERABAD, Jan 2 Under the Hospital Waste Management project launched by Umeed Foundation in collaboration with the UNDP and Liaquat University Hospital, an incinerator has started working at Jamshoro branch of the hospital to destroy hazardous risk waste of the university hospitals in Hyderabad and Jamshoro.

This machine destroys the waste by high temperature and reduces the emission of dangerous chemicals like dioxin and furan, the toxic gases which are released due to open burning of plastic and other material.

The administrator of the foundation, Dr Gulzar Usman, said in a statement that it was mandatory to dispose of infectious and risk waste of hospitals through incinerators. He, however, regretted that it was not being done in most of public and even private hospitals of the country.

The incinerator, he said, was installed in the Jamshoro hospital at a cost of Rs5.5 million as far back as 2003 but it did not function even for a single day and was rusting. He said that there was no proper system of segregation of different categories of waste to separate risk waste from general waste and no training was provided to the hospital staff.

He said that the foundation had planned the project in such a way that grey areas of waste management practices were improved.