NAKRA – Sustainable Waste Management in Hospitals

Another goal of the project is to initiate and enhance the contacts between Slovak and Austrian hospitals, to unite their energy towards the welfare of their patients and of the environment. The cooperation between the hospitals would also result in adjustment, respectively, further development of the regional standards of environmental and waste management in terms of the practical implementation of the EU requirements.

 

 

 

 

Hospitals prove an immense material turnover. In larger hospitals of e.g. 1,000 beds, the turnover can reach over 2 Mio. kg annually, i.e. the goods consumption in hospitals approximates, as order of magnitude, the one of small villages of ca. 2,000 inhabitants. This considerable material turnover results in the generation of large amounts of waste, respectively, recyclables and thus in costs for their disposal of about € 0.5 Mio annually. Keeping waste amounts and their disposal costs on a possibly low level grants great importance to the waste management in hospitals.

 

In both Slovakia and Austria, hospitals are currently aim at building up a sustainable environmental and quality management system and also at establishing an efficient waste disposal and recycling logistic system. This project renders support in creating the cross-border base for hospital waste management both in Bratislava and Vienna and thus gives a crucial impulse towards the qualitative and quantitative optimisation of the waste management practice.

 

The method suggested in this project for assessment of the waste management is based on an input-output-analysis and has already been successfully employed in a number of hospitals towards identification of optimisation potentials within the waste management.