Hospital waste is recyclable material: How medical technology can become more sustainable

Throwing away or burning single-use plastic products is the exact opposite of resource efficiency. However, many single-use products are used in inpatient and outpatient treatments, resulting in a considerable and increasing amount of waste. The healthcare sector is also required to be climate-neutral by the middle of the century and to have closed material cycles.

The researchers at the Dresden branch of Fraunhofer WU are convinced that this goal is achievable. In the new white paper »ReMed« (Recyling for sustainable medical technology), they outline strategies for increasing the proportion of recycled plastics from medical products in the short, medium and long term. The focus is on waste in hospitals; an important basis for the paper is the results of a survey on current disposal processes and opportunities for more recycling of plastics, in which a total of 27 hospitals in Saxony took part.

According to the Fraunhofer researchers, successful strategies must provide answers to key questions about the composition of the waste, the parties involved in the process chain, regulations, material flows and processing options for recyclates. Finally, the team subjected its proposals for the collection, separation, processing, utilisation and recycling of plastic waste to a "reality check" by experts from the Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital at the Technical University of Dresden. This is because the sustainable use of disposable medical products must not take up too much space in day-to-day clinical practice, especially in operating theatres, nor lead to significant additional work.

Examples of improvements that can be implemented in the short and medium term
Incertainty when sorting waste often leads to errors in categorisation, meaning that plastics that are actually harmless are removed from the recycling cycle and incinerated as a precautionary measure. This could be remedied by a standardised, simplified and cross-institutional system for labelling waste containers. Colours or understandable symbols would make it easier to choose the right container.

The IWU team emphasises that greater consideration should be given to the addition of bio-based plastics in the processing of mixed recyclates in order to reduce the CO2 footprint. As they are obtained from starch and sugar-containing plants, bioplastic compounds are regarded as carbon sinks - and hardly any fossil carbon is released during waste incineration. Furthermore, if materials from a group of plastics are collected separately, fewer mixed recyclates are produced, which facilitates the production of new, high-quality plastics. This would initially only require the installation of an additional waste container in the clinics.
Long-term improvements require a longer breath
Medical products are manufactured according to particularly high quality standards. An interim goal on the way to a closed material cycle within the medical sector should be to make the processed material from used goods accessible to other industries that are less heavily regulated.

In the long term, automated separation processes could be developed for other plastics or groups of plastics. Newly developed systems should then separate waste into its components and decontaminate it in a closed process chain. Installed on the hospital site, these systems would replace manual sorting of the waste. Nothing would stand in the way of reselling the recyclates generated from the process. However, this approach requires further materials research.nbsp;

Returning used plastics to the materials cycle is also possible using feedstock (chemical) recycling processes. In this process, the plastic is broken down into its individual components, making the monomers or basic chemicals available for the production of new plastics. However, the prerequisite for the further processing of such materials into medical products is renewed authorisation. Facilitating this in the future is an important step towards closed material cycles. The following also applies to many other proposals: if the recycling rate for single-use plastics in the medical sector is to increase significantly, the legal framework must be adapted. After all, a high level of infection protection, which is currently a »driver« for plastic waste in hospitals, does not have to be at odds with the resource-conserving use of plastic products.

Download the white paper:https://www.iwu.fraunhofer.de/de/projekte/remed-mit-werkstofflichem-recycling-zu...

Article from "idw - Informationsdienst Wissenschaft" from 11 July 2023