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The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors last week passed legislation requiring manufacturers and medical distributors that produce home injection devices to submit a plan for safe disposal of the waste that results from their products.
The Safe Sharps Ordinance, in conjunction with the county’s existing Safe Drug Disposal Ordinance first passed in 2015 to provide easy drop-off locations for unwanted or expired medications, will ensure that the community is safely disposing of medical devices with sharp points or edges.
In 2009, it was estimated that 1.7 million sharps products are generated each month in Santa Clara County, with the number expected to grow each year.
In the ordinance itself, sharps waste is defined as needles, syringes and lancets that can cut or puncture the skin and are necessary for patient care outside of traditional health care settings.
Sharps can become contaminated with blood-borne pathogens and have the possibility of unintentionally transmitting deadly infectious diseases, including HIV and hepatitis B and C, county officials said.
Sharps manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies who produce and distribute medicines requiring home injection have six months from the starting date of the ordinance, officially April 6, to detail their plan on safe disposal of consumer-generated waste.
Bill Grimes, the county Consumer & Environmental Protection Agency’s manager, said the plan will be comprehensive in outlining how a company proposes to physically implement disposal kiosks, how they will reach out to the surrounding community, how they plan on reaching out to host sites for the kiosks and how they will meet the diverse needs of each demographic in the county.
The agency has a 60-day review period to agree on what works in the plan before it takes effect, Grimes said.
There is language in the ordinance to accommodate more than one plan, but in studying similar ordinances in Alameda and Santa Cruz counties, county staff found that the norm is having all medical providers working together to strategize best practices through one nonprofit steward.
Santa Clara County’s environmental agency also found that the neighboring counties typically benefited from having the same locations for disposing of unwanted or expired medicine and safe disposal boxes for sharps waste, according to Grimes.
There will be an option to pick up prepaid sharps containers for free mail-back services for homebound residents as well.
Grimes and his colleagues expect the kiosks to pop up at high-traffic areas in each district they’ve designated in the county, including places like senior centers or community centers.
The county is on track to have more take-back locations for meds than any county in California, Grimes said. There are currently 57 locations for unwanted medication drop-off services and that number will increase to an expected 100 by the end of the year.
The county’s goal is to have the Safe Sharps Ordinance-endorsed kiosks installed and up and running by later this year or early 2019, Grimes said.
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I hope that they come up with a more convenient and sanitary location than the Sunnyvale SMART Center. It’s out of the way, and it’s filthy, and I worry about tire punctures.