Rapid population growth has resulted in a demand led growth in hospitals, clinics, private individual practitioners, diagnostic centres and pathology services (Rahman et al., 2007). There has been concern that the facilities for waste disposal from healthcare establishments cannot cope with these growing demands (PRISM, 2004; Hassan et al., 2008). Any waste management plan should be based upon a reliable estimate of the amount of waste generated
(Karamouz et al., 2007) and the objective of this study was to use a rigorous sampling method to gain a reliable estimate of the hazardous and non-hazardous waste generated by HCEs in Dhaka City. Reports dealing with the total waste generated in Dhaka and Bangladesh (Table 1) give estimates of total waste generation in the city ranging from 7.2 ton per day to 400 ton per day.
Some of the estimates, including those from the best resourced
studies, are associated with projects not primarily intended to obtain
a reliable estimate of total waste generation, while others use
extrapolation from studies undertaken in other countries, and still
others do not provide details of the basis of their estimates.