Clinical and Infectious Waste Management

Since late 2013, all major hospitals in Colombo did not have a mechanism to dispose of clinical waste. This crisis developed when the local authorities banned dumpsites from accepting either clinical waste or autoclaved clinical waste.

In December 2013, hospitals such as the National General Hospital and the National Cancer Institute, Maharagama had to resort to using hospital wards as temporary storage for clinical waste which in turn lead to several public protests and hospital staff demanding a cleaner and safer work environment.

It was with this threat of all major hospitals coming to a halt in operations that Encare commenced its activities on 07 January 2014. Immediate focus and urgency were placed on normalizing hospital operations in Colombo. After a collection of over 70,000kg of backlogged clinical waste, Encare was able to successfully resolve the crisis by the beginning of March 2014.

Encare was established in 2014 as Sri Lanka’s first Tri-Partite Agreement with the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Central Environmental Authority (CEA), (under the Ministry of Environment) to establish the Centralized Clinical Waste Treatment Facility in 2014. Encare is Sri Lanka’s only Centralised Clinical Waste Treatment Facility with a complete flue gas treatment solution that cleans all emissions prior to discharge into the environment.

We provide end-to-end solutions to our Clients which include storage solutions, transport, incineration and conversion of residual ash into eco-friendly blocks.

Our Objectives

As there are no operational sanitary landfills in Sri Lanka, and subsequent legal issues in the acceptance of autoclaved clinical waste to existing Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) dumpsites, Encare’s mission is to provide a complete incineration solution that is equipped with a flue gas treatment system. Together with this technology, our company’s objectives are as follows:

• Implement long-term clinical waste minimization and segregation at source level through a streamlined operational and monitoring framework.
• Provide hospitals with regular and uninterrupted clinical waste collection, treatment and disposal mechanisms – and thereby, reduce clinical waste being dumped.
• Minimize total emissions arising from either open burning and/or rudimentary, low temperature, small-scale incinerators (without flue gas abatement systems)