Infectious and hazardous medical waste poses a deliberate threat to environmental health and needs special treatment and management prior to its ultimate disposal. Many of hospitals in Sylhet have neither a satisfactory waste management system nor a disposal policy. This study represents the present status of Hospital Waste (HW) management in Sylhet city, Bangladesh. A survey has been conducted using a questionnaire to collect information about the practices related to waste segregation, collection procedures, the type of temporary storage containers, on-site transport and central storage area, treatment of wastes, off-site transport, and final disposal options. Physico-chemical characteristics of medical wastes also have been determined according to standard methods. In developing nations like Bangladesh contrasted with developed countries, the management of infectious wastes has not received adequate consideration. The generation rate of medical waste is the key data for assessing and planning the transfer arrangement of medical waste. The waste generation rate of every unit in a hospital is diverse. The waste of every unit requires an alternate sort of analysis and treatment. It has been found that waste generation rates in government hospitals are higher than in private hospitals. Effective medical waste management programs are multispectral and require cooperation between all levels of implementation, from national and local governments to hospital staff and private organizations.

Increasing salinity is a crucial issue for the people of coastal regions in Bangladesh. To resolve this problem, efficient and low-cost materials can be used as adsorbents to remove salinity from water. Among those, laterite soil (LS) is one of the efficient adsorbents in water treatment. This study demonstrates a low-cost salinity removal technique using laterite soil as adsorbent. The effect of burning temperature on raw laterite and synthetic laterite has been analyzed. The performance of the adsorbents has been observed in terms of efficiency in salinity removal. Both batch and column adsorption have been carried out to evaluate the adsorption capacity of raw LS and burned LS, respectively. Raw laterite shows maximum adsorption capacity of 21.24 mg/g in batch adsorption at an initial concentration of 900 mg/L. The optimum burning temperature for thermally treated LS has been found as 600 °C. However, SLS burned at 600 °C gives greater chloride ion removal efficiency (44.54%) than LS (38.23%) in removing salinity from water.