Recyclability, sustainability gain momentum at HealthPack 2012

Growing hospital waste is addressed in at least three different sessions at the Albuquerque event.

Jennifers
Jennifers

With members that include Baxter, BD, Cardinal Health, Covidien, Johnson&Johnson, as well as packaging suppliers and waste and energy management companies, the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) is off and running in its role as a private technical coalition of peers “seeking to inspire and enable sustainable, cost-effective recycling solutions for plastic product and materials used in the delivery of healthcare,” according to its Web site.

Even a 1% improvement in recycling plastic hospital waste from plastic medical devices and packaging could have a dramatic and positive environmental impact, noted Dan Penny, director of packaging engineering, Cardinal Health.

Penny spoke on behalf of HPRC during HealthPack 2012. “We’ve developed a healthcare advisory board [that includes] Kaiser Permanente and Stanford. We take a value-chain approach that involves the hospitals improving the material recognition of plastics, best practice methods, space, and logistics. Corrugated recycled is used extensively at hospitals, but if it will cost, they can’t afford it.” He noted that HPRC focuses on prepatient, noncontaminated materials.

He said HPRC continues to conduct pilot studies at U.S. hospitals that focus on learning the best ways or practices to collect and recycle plastics cost-effectively. Penny pointed to a nine-month study at Cleveland Clinic in which 50% of waste was attributable to polypropylene wrap, with the rest coming from packaging that includes both rigid trays and flexible materials.

“Some desirable design practices could be to create polyolefin seals, PP bottles, and plastics made from one discreet product,” Penny explained. Worst practices, he pointed out, included “rubber seals on PP bottles, chemically incompatible plastics; welding or gluing of unlike components, paper indicator tape on sterilization wrap, paper labels on plastic wraps, and metalized products.”

Responsible packaging by design

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