friday 13th – visiting a clinical waste disposal facility
yeah yeah, sure. it looks like any other blue sky or industrial photo that you may have seen here on a photo a day, however…..
unlke in the other shots, i have actually spent a whole day inside of this building – a medical waste disposal centre.
the lobby area is staffed by some pretty fine looking receptionists (really), actually on a higher ratio than in almost any other place i have been (and believe me, i have been around). the walls are the same bright pink that you see outside and the air is filled with the pungeant odour of that aerosol spray that people keep in their bathrooms to cover up the smell of an exceptionally toxic shit. (most of us know that the end result is a toilet that smells of an awefuly rancid smelling turd mixed with a really artificial smell that is worse than the original turd smell that started the whole mess – light a match, people).
lovely.
once you pass that point into the ‘authorised staff’ area, you enter a different world.
induction tells you that yellow bins contain ‘sharps’, black is ‘sensitive documents’, purple is filled with the stuff covered by a word that i have never heard of before, there are a few other colour codes, but i will always remember that the burgandy bins are filled with ‘anatomy’.
awesome. bring it on.
have you ever wondered where the amputated limbs of a motorcyclist after a crash a crash go? what happens to the homeless puppies and kittens from the rspca/aspca after they are ‘destroyed’, foetuses from abortions, cancerous tumours that have been cut out, uncle tom’s kidney, that syringe they put in the bin after you have had a blood test, medications that have passed used-by date, the fat from hollywood lyposuction, unidentified people when found dead and all the bits and pieces of people that they scrape off the road after a horrific car accident?
well, that all comes here.
so here is the deal. we are at a medical waste disposal facility. a huge warehouse filled with different coloured bins full of crazy stuff that you really do not want to get too close to. there are massive compactors squishing all of this shit together – the juices from which are collected below, sometimes spilling onto the concrete floors below are the true definition of cesspool. four enormormous incinerators (the chimneys of three of those are pictured above) burning all of this, spread the ash all about sydney, for us all to breath in and wipe off our crockery.
in the lesser touched parts of the warehouse – like up in the roof, in the rafters and on the ledges of unopened windows, the dust sits an inch high. if it could sit higher, it would, except that physics make it fall to the floor where it is prompty cleaned up a few times a day. it really is a clean operation. clockwork.
inside of the warehouse - probably about 5 acres – is a suprising small, but very efficient staff. everyone knows their job, does it well and they all seem quite happy and chirpy.
trucks roll in and unload their cargo to a bay, from which it is sorted. arrange in bins by colour in a holding bay. loaded with clean bins (hand dried), they roll out again.
i had to hold my breath walking through the bin holding bays – the smell of meat/juice putrification was so intense. the generally friendly staff were working and chatting away and a few were up for a bit of a little talk. i was actually holding my breath walking through this zone of the warehouse and spoke to a few once we were out in the open air.
general concensus was that most new employees stop noticing the smell after about a month. your body and senses just adapt so that it something that you just don’t notice at all.
in a workplace like this if an employee is not paying attention, things really could go wrong. it’s a place that a lot of people i know find to be absolutely disgusting, but it is a hidden part of our life.
essential services without which, things would stop functioning without us even knowing it.
i think that many of us live in a bubble. there is an army of folk who do the ‘dirty work’ for us. some of then like the work, others are resigned to it and others do it as a means to the next step or an end. they all deserve our gratitude and respect.
i am grateful to have had access to this place – it just reminds me of how lucky i am.
this is a cowboy photo of a HUGE bin full of medical sharps
Edited: January 13th, 2012
