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

Granulate for the production of high-quality new plastics is obtained from sorted, pure plastic waste. However, labor-intensive manual waste separation is not feasible in everyday clinical practice. © iStock / Miguel Malo

In German hospitals, several million tons of waste are generated annually from used protective masks, test kits, syringes, gloves, or surgical gowns. The majority of these single-use items are thermally processed, meaning they are incinerated. A team of researchers at Fraunhofer IWU does not want to accept this: they propose solutions that gradually increase the recycling rate of plastic products in the healthcare sector without burdening clinical staff with additional tasks.

Disposing of or burning plastic single-use products is the exact opposite of resource efficiency. However, many single-use items are used in inpatient and outpatient treatments, leading to significant and growing waste volumes. The goal for the healthcare sector is also to be climate-neutral by the middle of the century and to establish closed material cycles.

The researchers at the Dresden division of Fraunhofer WU are convinced: this goal is achievable. In the new white paper "ReMed" (Recycling for Sustainable Medical Technology), they present strategies for increasing the recycling share of plastics from medical devices in the short, medium, and long term. The focus is on waste from hospitals; an important basis for the paper are the results of a survey on current disposal processes and opportunities for more recycling of plastics, in which a total of 27 Saxon clinics participated.

Successful strategies, according to the Fraunhofer researchers, must answer core questions about the composition of the waste, the stakeholders involved in the process chain, regulations, material flows, and processing options for recyclates. The team subjected their proposals for collection, separation, processing, utilization, and recycling of plastic waste to a "reality check" by experts from the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus at the Technical University of Dresden. Because in everyday hospital operations, sustainable handling of single-use medical products should neither take up much space — especially in operating rooms — nor lead to significant additional work.

Examples of short- and medium-term improvements

Uncertainty in waste sorting often leads to errors in classification, causing harmless plastics to be excluded from the recycling cycle and incinerated "just in case." A uniform, simplified, and cross-facility system for labeling waste containers could help. Colors or understandable symbols would make choosing the right container easier.

To reduce the carbon footprint, the IWU team emphasizes that the addition of bio-based plastics in the processing of mixed recyclates should be considered more strongly. Since they are derived from starch and sugar-rich plants, bioplastics are considered carbon sinks — during incineration, they release hardly any fossil carbon. Additionally, if materials from a specific plastic group are collected separately, less mixed recyclates are produced, facilitating the manufacture of new, high-quality plastics. Initially, this would only require placing an additional waste container in hospitals.

Long-term improvements require a longer-term perspective

Medical devices are manufactured according to particularly high quality standards. An intermediate goal on the way to a closed material cycle within the healthcare sector should be to make processed materials from used products accessible to other industries that are less heavily regulated.

In the long term, automated separation processes for other plastics or plastic groups could be developed. Newly developed systems should then separate and decontaminate waste into its components within a closed process chain. Installed on hospital premises, these systems would replace manual sorting of waste. There would be no obstacle to reselling the recyclates produced from the process. However, this approach requires further materials research.

The return of used plastics into the material cycle is also possible through resource-based (chemical) recycling processes. In this process, plastics are broken down into their individual components, making monomers or basic chemicals available for the production of new plastics. However, re-approval is required for the further processing of such materials into medical devices. Facilitating this in the future is an important step toward closed-loop material cycles. Many other proposals also depend on adjusting the legal framework to significantly increase the recycling rate of single-use plastics in the healthcare sector. Because high infection protection, which under current law is a "driver" of plastic waste in hospitals, does not have to conflict with resource-conserving handling of plastic products.