Abstract
Technological innovation and planned obsolescence, combined with the high consumption of electronic equipment, produce a large amount of waste from these products. As e-waste can be a risk to human and the environment, the society and governments’ concern with its disposal has increased. This study aims to verify hospital medical electronic waste management in federal public hospitals in Rio de Janeiro. A qualitative research was carried out for descriptive purposes, using field research. The results indicate that: most of the studied hospitals use the equipment as much as possible and only discard them when there is no more maintenance possibility; equipment donation is the most common destination among the hospitals studied; bureaucratic barriers are the biggest obstacle to proper reverse logistics; and research hospitals, comparing to assisting hospitals, invest more in modern devices in their service. For future studies, it is recommended to do a more extensive analyse on other types of electrical electronic equipment management, in order to verify if the difficulties are the same for all the apparatuses and what the peculiarities of each one are.