Blue bag blues
Garbage at recycling centre regularly contaminated with used needles
Staff at recycling depots find discarded needles, lancets and syringes on a regular basis, according to the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) and management at Camdon Recycling.
“It’s ongoing. It’s been ongoing for years and I’ve been there for 15 years,” said Corrine MacDonald, administration and marketing manager at Camdon Recycling in Sydport Industrial Park, which manage the municipality’s recycling program.
“We get containers that are full of lancets … they tend to be in pop bottles but we’ve also gotten them in Kleenex boxes.”
This causes concern since being accidentally stuck by a sharp can lead to contracting a disease like hepatitis B, hepatitis C or HIV.
It can also lead to drug poisoning, if there is any of the drug left on the tip of the needle, depending on the drug.
“We’ve had numerous employees stuck by sharps over the years … and, yes, it may have been a needle from a diabetic, but that doesn’t mean that diabetic doesn’t have hep C,” MacDonald said.
“It’s a traumatic experience for anyone stuck by sharps because then it’s a six-month process of blood tests.”
Jeff Strong is the operations supervisor at Camdon Recycling, where he’s worked for 17 years.
“It’s been an issue in the recycling business since the start,” said Strong, who’s worked in the industry for 22 years.
“A lot of times, when the bags are opened, they fall out and we have to pick them up off the belt (by hand)… We could be shut down for an hour just picking up sharps.”
Production stops when a sharp is spotted. Staff pick them off the conveyor belt and put them in a bucket.
Then staff look through other material on the belt to see if they can find the address the sharp(s) came from. If they find an address, the municipality tries to follow up with the resident, to educate them about proper disposal.
“Sometimes when we see needles in a household, in their waste stream, it is an accident, not intentional,” said Roschell Clarke, solid waste education co-ordinator for the CBRM.
Other times, it is people filling up a pop bottle or other container with sharps and tossing it in the trash, an accepted practice before there was a recycling program.
Clarke said unsafe needle disposal is also a risk to curbside collectors since sometimes they are in garbage bags.
“Every time they go to a household they are handling those bags by hand. They never know what could be contained in those bags,” she said.
“That is why we don’t want needles, sharps, lancets, syringes in the garbage or in our blue bags.”
All used sharps should be discarded in a Safe Sharps container. These are available for free for diabetics at pharmacies across the province thanks to the Safe Sharps Container Bring-Back Program.
People do not have to get their prescriptions filled at the pharmacy to get the container. They do have to show their prescription for insulin or a doctor’s note. Once the container is full, it can be exchanged for a new one for free at any pharmacy.
“Pharmacies will not accept needles in any container except a Safe Sharps container,” said Clarke.
The program, co-ordinated by the Pharmacy Association of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Diabetes Association, does not accept needles from homecare professionals or intravenous drug users.
“I wish that program could be expanded to include more needle users than it does,” said Strong.
There is a needle exchange at the Ally Centre of Cape Breton and people can get Safe Sharp containers there for free, no questions and no judgment. It is the Sharp Advice Needle Exchange (S.A.N.E.) and is the only one in the CBRM.
Clarke said they have seen an increase in needles picked up during their summer Transformers program.
In 2017, they collected 138 needles, including one-full Safe Sharps container. That is up from a total of 29 in 2016.