Isabella Woodstock
Executive and Marketing Assistant, Envetec
As sustainability and innovation stand out as key proponents in aiding in our climate crisis, the recycling of biohazardous waste is a transformative solution to aiding in the major environmental challenges we face. Biohazardous waste, which can also be referred to as infectious waste or regulated medical waste, consists of waste that is contaminated with infectious agents or fluids that are considered a risk to public health. This waste could contain sharps, blood tubes, or petri dishes in food and beverage manufacturing.
Historically, handling infectious and biohazardous waste has involved incineration, autoclaving, and landfills due to the difficulty of handling this form of waste. Each of those processes poses detrimental effects on the environment and completely destroys the plastic, making it unrecyclable. By finding a solution to the treatment of biohazardous waste and creating a path towards recycling, the accumulation of waste in landfills is reduced and the release of carbon emissions is reduced as well. Through transforming waste into valuable materials, we are able to take steps towards a more sustainable future.
Why Recycling Biohazardous Plastic Matters
In the healthcare sector, single-use plastic is heavily relied on due to sterility, affordability, and design flexibility, but these plastics create a huge environmental issue. Not only is the disposal of plastics detrimental to the environment, but the production of plastics also adds extreme concerns to our climate. Healthcare’s climate footprint is equivalent to 8.5% of all U.S. emissions, and laboratories produce enough plastic waste each year to cover Manhattan ankle deep. These statistics highlight why recycling biohazardous plastic matters, and through recycling biohazardous plastics, a chain of circularity is created.
Circularity facilitates a reduction of virgin plastic production and a reduction of waste to landfills. It is why embracing innovation and finding solutions is not only important, but crucial.
Embracing Innovative Technologies: How GENERATIONS Works
Technology like Envetec’s GENERATIONS offers a solution to the previous methods being conducted to treat biohazardous waste. GENERATIONS is a non-thermal shredding and disinfection technology that treats waste at the source, transforming the waste into a clean polymer flake that is suitable for recycling. This process enables the opportunity for circularity because, through the GENERATIONS technology, these materials are given another life.
GENERATIONS works as follows:
- Biohazardous waste is shredded and disinfected onsite, ensuring that it is successfully disinfected.
- The resulting flake material is collected by a recycling partner and can be separated by polymer type, such as polypropylene, polyethene, and polystyrene, allowing for recycling into a wide range of new products.
- This avoids the need for fossil fuel extraction, polymerisation, and the energy-intensive steps of creating virgin plastics, making a significant impact on biohazardous waste recycling efforts.
This type of innovation is pivotal in embracing circularity in the treatment of biohazardous waste.
The Role of Circularity in a Sustainable Future
Circularity is the concept of reducing, reusing, and recycling materials within a closed-loop system to minimise waste across the production and consumption cycle. Not only is this beneficial for sustainability, but it also has many economic benefits. A circular economy keeps materials in use for as long as possible to maximise their value and reduce waste. Embracing circularity in the healthcare industry is an extremely important way to manage waste. It creates a path for the healthcare industry to still maintain its hygienic standards, but also cut its plastic footprint and scope 3 emissions exponentially. This approach conserves resources and helps drive economic efficiency. By integrating circularity into the treatment of biohazardous waste with technology such as GENERATIONS, we can protect human health, conserve resources, and turn waste into value.
