healthcare
Environmental solutionsnews Covering infection prevention, medical waste management & sustainable practices
VOL. XIV NO.43 XII NO.
www.HealthcareEnvironmentalSolutions.com
fall 2018 WINTER 2016
Study Into Recycling Medical Plastics Could Provide Cure for Hospitals
A
study into creating a single waste stream of flexible plastics from hospitals and converting that material into new products – rather than shipping it off as waste to bulging landfills – could, if successful, provide medical facilities nationwide with a new viable recycling alternative. “This is an opportunity to find viable solutions to remove more plastics from our landfills,” says Zac Conaway, manager of waste, recycling and training for Waste Management and Environmental Services at DartmouthHitchcock Medical Center. “All of us are looking at our environment and how we affect our environment from a healthcare standpoint,” says Conaway, who also serves as coordinator of the Environmental Sustainability Council at the Lebanon, NH, medical center. “One of the big things from a waste standpoint is we’re running out of landfill space and the cost to dispose of our waste is going to be exponentially growing over next number of years. The goal of the study is to look at innovative ways to reduce what we send to the landfill and pulling out material that can be used in another form.”
By P.J. Heller Dartmouth-Hitchcock, along with the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania, are participating in the study under the auspices of the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC). Although recyclers have been willing to accept used clean blue sterilization wrap -- a polypropylene material which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates accounts for 19 percent of all operating room waste -- they have generally balked at taking in other flexible plastics used in packaging for disposal medical supplies from hospital operating rooms. Some of the flexible plastic has been shipped overseas, including to Southeast Asia, China,
Taiwan, Vietnam and India, but Conaway says those countries and others have tightened up on what they will accept for recycling or have stopped accepting the flexible plastic materials entirely. “I think that’s what brings this project into relevance,” he says. “With fewer and fewer avenues internationally being created, generating avenues for recycling within the U.S. would be even better. We need to find innovative solutions to create viable recycling streams domestically.” Peylina Chu, executive director of the plastics council, says the flexible packaging materials are especially challenging for recyclers because the type of plastic used is often not known. “Is it polyethylene? Is it polypropylene? Is it PVC? Some of the packaging is multi-laminate, so it’s got multiple materials sandwiched between plastic. There might be a nylon film. There might be a polyester film. You can’t readily tell by just looking at it whether it’s a multi-laminate or not,” Chu says. The aim of the study, which began in early 2018, is to develop a “recipe” that will allow the materials to be blended to create new viable products. It follows on a study several years ago conducted by HPRC in collaboration with Penn State, where Plastics Engineering students tested and analyzed the physical
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