Notice of RetractionComparative Environmental Assessments of Hospital Waste Management Systems

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Efficient hospital waste management is crucial for the prevention of the exposure of hospital workers, patients, and the community to infections, hazardous wastes and injuries as well as the protection of the environment. With respect to environmental impacts, this study presents life cycle assessment methodology on the system of hospital waste management with a case of city in China. To evaluate the environmental impacts of different systems, two scenarios were constructed: sterilization with landfill and direct hazardous waste incineration. The results show that technological choices are of great importance in environmental impacts of hospital waste management systems. The conventional waste hierarchy, incineration with energy recovery is better than landfill, is coincident in the case of hospital waste. For global warming, the direct landfill gases releasing from landfill stage is the key issue in the sterilization scenario; while incineration stage dominates in the other scenario. For human toxicity, landfill stage is the main contributor in both scenarios.