Healthcare Plastic Waste Recycling Guide Turns Waste To Valuable Material


03/29/2019

Thanks to the high standards of FDA, the plastic waste generated by the healthcare sector in the U.S. could be a fitting recycling material.


Dailycsr.com – 29 March 2019 – In the United Stated the healthcare facilities contribute to nearly “14,000 tons of waste” on a daily basis. And twenty five percent of this pile of waste is made out of plastic products and packaging, while eighty five percent of these plastic waste are “non-infectious” and never comes in with any patient’s contact.
 
Estimations show that around one million tons of “clean, non-infectious healthcare plastics” gets wastes annually.
 
Keeping the strict standards set by the “United States Food and Drug Administration”, the “medical supplies, equipment, and associated packaging” use “pure, high-quality materials” plastic. According to hprc.org:
“As the importance of sustainability continues to rise within the marketplace, manufacturers and major brand owners are increasingly looking for high-quality recycling content to utilize in the formulation of their products. By working with hospitals to help them produce clean streams of specific materials, plastics recyclers can gain a valuable material source which can help them improve the performance of their regrind and repro pellets and products made from these materials”.
 
Now, here is a situation which could be turned to our advantage, although the question remains as to how one, especially the recyclers, can “take advantage of this clean plastics waste stream” for creating something valuable out of it.
 
It is to answer this question and to provide a solution the HPRC has come out with a “Healthcare Plastics: Guidance for Recyclers ”, which will help the latter to achieve the recycling aim of these plastic wastes. This guide provides information for educating the recyclers as well as processors about the “common streams of plastic waste generated from clinical settings”. Furthermore, hprc.org added:
“We lay out the common materials, strategies for working with hospitals, processing techniques, and potential markets to help build the foundation for recycling across the healthcare industry—and make it easier for recyclers everywhere to partner with hospitals and see the benefits of hospital plastics recycling”.
 
Kindly click on the link below for downloading the recyclers’ guidance on healthcare plastic waste:
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/49d7a0_46a9a9caee44404e82fd70ff964eee32.pdf
 
 
 
References:
3blmedia.com