To understand the characteristics of these wastestreams and the difficulties that might be encountered when attempting their pretreatment, it is important to understand the operations or sources of waste that contribute pollutants to the individual wastestreams. In this way, the chemical constituency of each wastestream can be predicted and potential interferences in a mercury removal process can be anticipated. The following are brief overviews of typical wastewater-producing processes in each category of hospital facility. Each overview includes an interpretation of the analytical data generated from a wastewater sampling and analyses project that was performed at a representative facility. Refer to the next section of this report for a summary of the WWC Subgroup project.
Some clinical laboratories are independent of hospitals.
Generally, the larger the hospital, the greater the extent of services offered by the clinical laboratory. In addition, there can be cytogenetics, flow cytometry, histocompatibility testing, molecular pathology, mycology, and nuclear medicine. Because there is usually some standardization of work, the wastewater from a specific clinical laboratory may be somewhat consistent in quality and characteristics over long periods. Wastes may be produced in significant quantities for short periods or not at all for extended periods. Some facilities, trying to reduce the cost of offsite waste disposal, have chosen to install on-site medical waste incinerators to burn these wastes.