Waste Away: The unending chore of medical trash disposal.

• Author: Pesznecker, Katie
• Position: HEALTHCARE

At a strip mall in midtown Anchorage, a woman is getting inked with her first tattoo. Nearby, someone uses a midday lunch break for a teeth cleaning. Across town, a trembling puppy gets its first immunization shots, while just down the road, someone receives lifesaving chemotherapy.

Each experience produces medical waste--tubing, gauze, needles, and more-all of which must be treated and disposed of in a precise, safe manner.

Many large medical hospitals and facilities handle their own waste. For smaller medical offices, veterinarians, tattoo parlors, Botox clinics, dentists, rural providers, and others, medical waste disposal is a niche industry composed of three licensed businesses in Alaska: Entech and Alaska Medical Waste are headquartered in Anchorage, and Safety Waste Incineration is based in Wasilla.

One thing all three have in common is strict regulation.

"There are numerous agencies involved, from the transportation side of medical waste to the processing of the waste itself to incineration and air quality," says Jonathan Fries, site manager for Entech. "This is different from handling normal garbage for sure. There is a lot of paperwork. You're limited to what you can do with the waste and how it has to be handled. Compliance-wise, we want to make sure we're 100 percent doing it the right way."

The three Alaska-based licensed facilities submit regular reports to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). The department only regulates medical waste treatment facilities that are not contained within a hospital, medical office, laboratory, or other medical or research institution. Because many of the state's largest healthcare facilities, such as Providence and Alaska Regional hospitals, process their own waste, the total volume of medical waste produced annually in Alaska is impossible to quantify, says Kaylie Holland, Southcentral and Western Facilities Regional Manager for the Solid Waste Program at DEC.

The three DEC-regulated facilities can report annual waste amounts either in volume in gallons or weight in tons, Holland says. In 2021, the three companies reported receiving, treating, and disposing of 211,017 pounds and about 1.3 million gallons of medical waste.

Entech is the largest of the three and has been around the longest. Founded in the '90s, the company was purchased by Waste Connections, a larger waste management company, in 2012.

"We operate the majority of the time in the Anchorage area, but we do...