Study on awareness of e-waste management among medical students

Abstract

Background: Economic growth seen in the past 25 years with changes in Information Technology and the concurrent rapid electronic product obsolescence has generated massive amounts of electronic waste (or e-waste), creating a general waste management issue, due to the presence of many hazardous chemicals in electronic products, with a potential to severely compromise human health and environment. The purpose of this study is to describe awareness regarding the existence, hazards and management of e-waste among medical students and to measure effect of health educational intervention.  Methods:An interventional cross-sectional study was carried out from May to June, 2016 among II MBBS students, Kurnool Medical College, Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh. A predesigned questionnaire was administered as pretest followed by health educational intervention session to 100 study subjects selected by simple random sampling and a post test two weeks later. Data was entered in MS Excel 2007 and analyzed. Chisquare test was applied and p value < 0.05 considered significant.  Results: Out of 100 study subjects, 4 did not participate in the post test. So, a total of 96 questionnaires were considered for analysis.  56.25% of the students were males and 43.75% were females. Their main source of information regarding e-waste management was internet (30.2%) followed by family & friends (16.6%). There was a statistically significant gain in knowledge regarding e-waste management among the study subjects after the educational intervention at p<0.05.  Conclusions:Health education to create awareness regarding the hazards and management of e-waste is the need of the hour to reduce, reuse and recycle e-waste.