Shuttle Service - Shuttlepac

20-20 Vision Shuttle service

The Covid 19 pandemic affected every aspect of people’s lives as well as every manufacturing company in the world. It is easy in retrospect to see how things could have been done better. However at Shuttlepac which has been on the front line serving the NHS, among many others in the healthcare industry, the company’s efforts to develop and utilise more recyclable plastic has paid dividends for both healthcare trusts and patients alike.

Over the last two years, the demand for recyclable plastic has grown beyond all expectations. The Covid pandemic has also added to this increase in global demand. However, Shutlepac has been optimising its recyclable capabilities and is now one of industry leaders in this field.

It is estimated that since the 1950s, humans have produced over 8.3 billion tons of plastic. It has only been brought to the attention of the public in more recent years, by documentaries (such as Our Planet with David Attenborough) or by activists such as Greta Thunberg. The British Government has launched the 25 Year Environment Plan which has pledged to eliminate all avoidable plastic waste by 2042. This will include the abolishment of plastic straws, carrier bags and food packaging.

Plastic in Healthcare

However, much of the single use plastic in healthcare is seemingly unavoidable, with a whopping 25% of the waste generated by hospitals being plastic. The use of plastic gloves and masks in hospitals are integral to protect healthcare workers from disease. Plastic is an extremely desirable material for hospitals and other healthcare environments due to it being low cost, very easily processed, very lightweight and able to be sterilised very easily. Plastic can even be modified to have a bacteria-resistant coating to help protect workers. “ much of the single use plastic in healthcare is seemingly unavoidable, with a whopping 25% of the waste generated by hospitals being plastic ”

“ home testing kits are now being rolled out across the nation ”

While it is clear nobody can argue that safely disposing of hazardous PPE or biohazardous samples is an essential use of plastic, only 15% of healthcare waste is classed as “hazardous”. This title covers waste that could be a source of infection or is radioactive or toxic. The other 85% of medical waste is not dissimilar from the plastic waste generated at home, which is where the reduction could come from.

In your typical operating theatre, there will be vast quantities of “blue wrap” used to place sterile equipment on or inside, which could easily be replaced by a sterilisable container. Surgeons also often use small resealable disposable plastic bags to keep their sterilised equipment inside, and it has been suggested this could be replaced by a small tightly woven pouch such as those created by EnviroPouch which was created in 1993 and purchased by Barbara Knight in 2001.

Plastic gloves are another example, where in some cases are used unnecessarily. There was a time, as stated by the Sustainable Development Unit for England’s National Health Service, when nurses at London’s Great Ormond Street hospital realised that healthcare professionals were choosing to use non-surgical gloves instead of washing their hands, when performing tasks such as moving beds or bathing babies. When nurses started to remind staff that the gloves were not intended for these purposes, glove usage went down. The hospital was able to cut its use of plastic gloves, saving 21 tonnes of plastic and £90,000 ($120,000) as a result.There are many uses for which, in healthcare, that plastic is currently the best option at our disposal at present. Hospitals can never be zero plastic waste due to biohazardous waste material, but there are certainly still ways to reduce this.

Home-Testing Kits

With the effects of the pandemic still in full swing, and home testing kits are now being rolled out across the nation, it is estimated that the UK is currently testing over 580, 000 people per day and over 4 million people per week. With this much single use plastic needing to be disposed of, and some of it incinerated seemingly the only way to cut back on this is to make the plastic packaging as small as possible within the regulatory guidelines, which the majority of test providers are not currently doing.

Help at hand

Working with industry experts, we shuttlepac has identified the many pain-points plaguing the industry (including the massive plastic wastage) with conventional 95kPa biohazard bags. The reduction of plastic, as well as producing the highest quality product, is at the forefront of every single one of Shutlepacs designs. Its UN3373 compliant biohazard transport solution – the ShuttlePouch™ - is the item of choice when it comes to reducing plastic wastage and providing secure secondary storage for biological material. The 73% reduction in plastic usage means that, when it comes to home-test kits, swapping to the ShuttlePouch™ would have a noticeably positive environmental impact.

Shuttlepac told SPN, “The biohazard transport packaging market is dominated by unnecessarily large plastic packaging. We are the first in the industry to prioritise the reduction in plastic usage, and our overall environmental impact. Now is the time to move into the modern age by employing the state-of-the-art shuttlepac packaging solutions for biohazard transport. We at shuttlepac are championing the reduction of plastic in biological sample secondary packaging. Did you know that the ShuttlePouch™ offers on average a 73% reduction in plastic when compared to our direct competitors? Could you imagine shopping for a few groceries and packing it in FOUR plastic bags instead of one? Yet this is normalised practice within the healthcare industry”