With at home rapid antigen testing (RAT) on the rise, there are concerns around the sheer amount of plastic waste it’s contributing to but also the toxicity of it.
More than nine million RAT kits have so far been distributed across New Zealand, each one consisting of a tester, a swab, a vial, a capsule (only in some), and a whole heap of micro packaging.
“We know that has created a really large amount of extra medical waste on a background of a large amount of waste that we create every year anyway and that’s a real concern because there’s a contradiction there where medical waste causes health harm where we're trying to keep people better and keep them safe from the pandemic,” said Alex Macmillan, an associate professor for environmental health at Otago University.
But that’s just one concern with 1News speaking to a few pharmacists who said there’s some worry around the effects of the chemicals in the testing kits. They’re also worried that there’ll be Covid-positive samples in the general waste, which could infect others.
So we asked a lab expert, who gets rid of other medical tests like PCRs by incinerating them as biohazard waste, what to do.
“If businesses have the opportunity and do have a facility to get rid of infectious waste, that’s an option, but it’s fine to put them in a sealed bag and just dispose of them correctly into the general rubbish,” NZ Institute of Medical Laboratory Science president Terry Taylor said.
He says even the buffer solution in the kit can be binned, despite some tests containing the toxic chemical sodium azide.
“The whole idea of that liquid is it actually neutralises the virus. So it’s got some agents in it that stops the virus persisting so it turns it into a non-infectious situation,” Taylor said.
The small amounts of it present won’t be harmful to adults but could be for younger children and pets.
The SPCA is warning to dispose of them correctly.
“If there was a smaller animal that could've got into them or if an animal has ingested several vials of these buffering solutions there is a potential for a more serious health consequences,” the SPCA’s scientific officer, Dr Alison Vaughan, has said.
Australia has recently seen a rise in calls to the animal poison helpline from the RATs.
“One of the big things that we don’t want is for them to appear in recycling areas of the recycling companies because as you can imagine we don’t want people to be handling those sort of things so the whole idea is once you’ve finished with your rapid antigen test, seal it away in a plastic bag put it in your general rubbish so it goes to general landfill and not recycling,” Taylor said.
But it’s perhaps time to think about how we can recycle these tests.
“While these tests are a really important part of our pandemic response we do need to get smarter in our response and that means dealing at the design and manufacture end. Companies that are designing these really important pieces of equipment need to now really take into account their environmental and therefore health harms,” Macmillan said.
The introduction of these tests to the mass public is an important part of our pandemic response, but could be taking us a step back in our sustainability efforts.
Just this week the United Nations agreed to create a historic global treaty to tackle plastic pollution and Macmillan says she’s calling on “our environment minister David Parker to play a really strong part in those negotiations”.
Those landmark negotiations are set to take place next year in the hope of combating our plastic waste woes.
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