Hello Prof and friends! 

 

Previously, we saw how air pollution has significantly decreased during the circuit breaker, a national lockdown in Singapore induced by COVID-19. Today, we will be uncovering a different aspect of pollution in our island.

 

With the pandemic, many people have been rushing to get tested at hospitals nationwide and this has led to an increase in biohazardous medical waste (Lim, 2020). For example, 1 out of 5 licensed fleet operators to dispose of such waste faced an increase of 60% in March and a whopping 150% in April compared to 2019. These waste include personal protective equipment (PPE) suits and disposable surgical masks, the latter being hoarded and resold during the first few weeks of circuit breaker. 

 

This waste has to be disposed of carefully, incinerated at a temperature of over a whopping 1000 degrees Celsius (Phua, 2020). With such intense (literally) measures needed, we should all do our part in reducing our medical waste such as using cloth masks. In our next post, we will explore how the circuit breaker has affected Singapore’s general waste! 

 

References

Lim, V. (2020). COVID-19: Biohazardous medical waste more than doubled during circuit breaker | Video. [online] Available at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/covid-19-biohazardous-medical-waste-more-than-doubled-during-12918988 [Accessed 6 Sep. 2020].

‌Phua, R. (2020). COVID-19: Medical waste workers put in extra hours to handle extra volume. [online] CNA. Available at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/covid-19-medical-waste-volume-up-worry-risk-workers-12621996 [Accessed 6 Sep. 2020].