Medical Field Considers Eco-friendly Ways of Disposing Medical Waste
The health care industry is fraught with the rising cost of waste disposal.
Medical practice generates lots of garbage annually because, for the sake of perceived safety, there are numerous single-use disposable items.
Many used items are made of recyclable material, but the majority of medical practices don't yet have a system of managing waste efficiently.
The operating room produces the most trash; about 20 to 30 percent of waste from a hospital comes from its ORs. Some surgical equipment and supplies are thrown out even though they are never used because sterile kits, once opened, aren't sterile anymore even though the surgeon may not have used every single tool and every piece of gauze in the kit.
Last year, Dr. Andrade and a nurse, Lynn Thelen, started an “O.R. green team” at Fairview. After getting input from colleagues, they scrutinized 38 types of operating room packs, figured out which supplies were never used (like plastic basins, catheters, syringes and dressings), and asked their medical product vendor to remove them.
One kit for implanting an intravenous port in chemotherapy patients contained 44 items, but the green team downsized it to 27 items and swapped disposable gowns and linens for reusable ones. That trimmed a pound of trash and $50 in supply costs per procedure. So far, Ms. Thelen said, the various kit reformulations have prevented 7,792 pounds of waste and saved $104,658.
As with any case that involves changing a working system, getting the entire health care industry to change its management of waste is challenging. No organization currently tracks how much medical trash the United States produces — the last known estimate, from the early 1990s, was two million tons a year.
Only recently has the industry begun addressing the amount of waste it generates. Why? Because being wasteful is getting pretty costly for both hospitals and patients.
Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit group in Reston, Va., works to reduce the environmental footprint of health care institutions. Practice Greenhealth’s members include around 1,100 hospitals and 80 companies.
Other hospitals are finding ways, with the help of nonprofits like Practice Greenhealth, to switch to the best sustainable practices for reducing operating-room garbage, energy consumption and indoor air quality problems — while lowering expenses and improving safety.
Eliminating the squandering of medical supplies and equipment can save on new purchases as well as incineration and landfill fees. Some institutions have turned to interventions like reducing their use of materials, recycling what they do use, and donating leftover but still usable items to developing nations.
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