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Victory! Alta Bates Hospital to Stop Incineration of Medical Waste Organizations that met with Alta Bates/Summit: City of Berkeley (City Councilmember) Center for Environmental Health Commonweal Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice SEIU Local 250 Students Organizing for Justice in the Americas UC-Berkeley Women's Cancer Resource Center For more information, contact:
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IES Incinerators Lose More Business! Greenaction and our allies in the Health Care Without Harm Coalition met with the Alta Bates/Summit Medical Center Administration on December 18th about medical waste incineration and hospital pollution prevention. Alta Bates has been sending its medical waste to be incinerated at Integrated Environmental Systems (IES) in East Oakland. IES operates the last commercial medical waste incinerators in California, but also has a small microwave unit on site. Our coalition has been demanding that IES shut the incinerators and switch entirely to microwave and other non-incineration treatment technologies. We are pleased to report that Alta Bates/Summit committed to switch to microwave treatment for the majority of Alta Bates' medical waste (except for pathological and chemo) within 2 weeks! We are also optimistic about future PVC plastics and mercury reduction/elimination and other pollution prevention opportunities there. Now that both Stanford and Alta Bates have committed to move away from incineration to the greatest extent possible, we hope to quickly convince other IES customers to follow their lead. We are already in touch with people from different communities that want to get involved with their local hospital. |