Hospital recycles operating room waste into park benches

A Brunswick, Maine,  hospital is reported to be successfully recycling operating room waste into park benches.

Mid Coast Hospital has launched a new recycling program that turns plastic waste from its operating rooms into park benches, trash cans and other items. Described by Mid Coast as the first of its kind in Maine, the program targets blue sterile wrap that’s primarily used to protect medical supplies and surgical instruments from contamination. The bulky wrap is clean when it’s tossed into the trash after being removed from surgical tools, but can’t be reused.

This is bulk waste produced in great volume. It can of course be sterilised as waste, but there is no logic in doing so. However, there will be good reasons not to place a black sack in the operating theatre, so what to do is sometimes a rather neutral question – there is only one option, to dispose as clinical waste. This means biting the bullet, to manage many additional bulky waste sacks that must not be compressed, and pay for its disposal at the highest rate.

So disposal as a clean recyclable is an ideal solution. Providing it is segregated reliably from used drapes and gowns that may be contaminate with blood, no further treatment is necessary. It is not, however, a failsafe approach to disposal and there can be few certainties about the elimination of bloodstained drapes from this waste stream.

Molly Gardner, left, Mid Coast Hospital’s linen and waste management aide, and registered nurse Jana Hentz-McDorr dressed up in blue-wrap items recently to educate the Brunswick hospital’s staff about a new recycling program.

 

Elsewhere, the separation from plastic residues from autoclaved clinical waste is technically possible. Latex gloves and non-woven polypropylene create difficulties but the technology works well enough to give a mixed plastic waste recyclate. It is unfortunate that the bottom has now fallen out of the market.

The use of Brunswick operating theatre plastic wrappings as the material source for bark bench manufacture is laudable. But always, someone will ask a tricky question and indeed I have had to deal with this. “What happens if…?”

Well, what does happen if blood from patient X contaminates the plastic recyclate? What happens if that is remanufactured to create a park bench and at some time in the future an arm is ripped off the bench and used as a weapon to batter a passer-by? Now, if the police seek forensic evidence to trace the criminal, will they discover DNA from patient X, and charge that entirely innocent individual with a crime the did not commit?

If you followed all that, you will realise that DNA will have been heated several times, to 138C and later to ~250C. In between, waste will have been washed thoroughly, and dried. DNA is a tough molecule, but unlikely to survive any one of those multiple treatment steps. Moreover, the DNA, should it survive, would be entrapped into the polymer matrix, not free on the surface, so the proposition that this commendable recycling process might place patients at risk of prosecution owes more to science fiction, and perhaps to CSI Miami, than to science fact.

So, if the process can work effectively, with segregated polypropylene wrappers of with mixed plastics from autoclaved, shredded bulk clinical wastes, even from sharps bins that might deliver a higher grade waste, then crack on. Regrettably, the Environment Agency would prefer such recycling to be dismissed from further consideration as it does not fit with their current ideology. Presently, even landfill deposit is a preferred option for much potentially recyclable clinical and offensive wastes that might feed energy from waste of cement kiln furnaces, plastics or fibre recovery, or methane generation. Instead, the options include landfill disposal and clinical waste incineration without heat recovery while neither should be on the list of acceptable options.

It will change, slowly, but the negative and generally obstructive attitudes of the Environment Agency, and current market conditions, stifle investment and inhibit translational research and commercial development.

Crack on.

 

http://www.theforecaster.net/news/print/2012/11/23/brunswick-hospital-recycles-operating-room-waste-p/143347

 

 

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