The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital released a new program for recycling plastic materials used in operating rooms, which have been found to produce large amounts of waste in order to maintain a sterile environment. For two years, Michigan Medicine has been working on a program to help reduce the amount of medical waste produced daily.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Chris Victory, senior mechanical engineer at Michigan Medicine, discussed some of the steps taken to implement the recycling initiative and goals to continue the reduction of carbon footprint within health care.
“We went through a pilot program where we collected material for six months or so,” Victory said. “We wanted to get an idea of quantity of material as well as quality of material and then pass that material to our recycling vendor and have them analyze it to make sure that this was something they felt comfortable accepting. Then something we could move forward to make this go beyond the pilot program and make this permanent.”
According to Victory, University of Michigan Health pays for plastic materials to be exported to a recycling partner in Ohio to be remade into other types of plastics, but this does not always include medical-specific plastics. Victory said the program’s ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of all plastics being used and purchased by Michigan Medicine.
“There’s a lot of data out there to support the (statement) that about 30% or so of all waste generated in a health care system can in some form or fashion be attributed to the operating rooms,” Victory said.
In an interview with The Daily, Chip Amoe, U-M Health sustainability officer, said she hopes to spread this initiative to other Michigan Medicine buildings.
“There are other instruments that do get reprocessed, they get collected and reprocessed,” Amoe said. “We’re also doing reprocessing of other noninvasive medical devices, things like blood pressure cuffs and tourniquets.”
Amoe said the initiative is beholden to certification requirements from The Joint Commission stating medical materials cannot be cross-contaminated, which contributes a great deal of waste. Materials with bodily fluids, for example, cannot be recycled and are considered to be hazardous waste. Despite some restrictions on what can be recycled, Amoe said much of the plastic produced by operating rooms is safe to recycle. Amoe also said one of the challenges of the initiative was finding recycling facilities that are willing to work with health care supplies because of the perceived risks.
“It’s a material recovery facility that can handle a variety of different plastics from various industries out there,” Amoe said. “We’re just fortunate enough that they’re able to accept a lot of the medical plastics because, as you can imagine, a lot of recycling vendors don’t want to work with hospitals because they’re concerned of some of the things we just discussed — of the risks involved of collecting things from a hospital.”
Rackham student Katelyn Heflin studies the upstream regulation of plastic manufacturers, specifically legislation called Extended Producer Responsibility that holds plastics manufacturers fiscally accountable for the variety of plastic packaging they introduce into the market. In an email to The Daily, Heflin spoke about the benefits of having a recycling program like the one at Mott.
“Much of medical waste is burned for sanitary purposes, so if you can recycle a portion of that instead, that’s a plus,” Heflin wrote. “Plastics have thousands of different chemical makeups and medical waste is sure to have a different composition from your typically recycled plastic.”
According to Victory, having a facility as close as Ohio to recycle these materials makes the recycling program easier to implement, but they hope to move to a more local facility in the future.
“We’re doing this and finding solutions for right now,” Victory said. “The goal is to explore them, tweak them, make them better, hopefully be able to find more local solutions, so we don’t have to transport things as far as Ohio in the future.”
Daily News Contributor Cristina Micu can be reached at cmicu@umich.edu.