ABSTRACT
The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe convened a meeting on hospital waste management at Bergen, Norway in 1983, which was the first international forum to discuss the issue of biomedical waste (BMW) management. With expansion of health infrastructure in the country, BMW in India is also on the rise. In this background, the purpose of the present chapter is two-fold: (a) to highlight the environmental impacts related to BMW and the need to manage these wastes, and (b) to estimate the costs of managing BMW in a metropolitan city using a case study of Chennai.
