It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2023-02-01
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): VinylPlus Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Sylvie Last name of representative: Famelart Gender: Female Nationality: Belgium Function: Senior Communications Manager Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Avenue De Cortenbergh 71 Town: Brussels Postal code: 1000 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 2 329 51 06 E-mail:sylvie.famelart@vinylplus.eu Website:https://www.vinylplus.eu
PVC is the most used plastic for disposable medical devices and is also easily mechanically recyclable through environmentally benign processes. To help the hospitals to divert their PVC devices from incineration after use, VinylPlus Med was developed in 2021. VinylPlus Med brings together Belgian hospitals, adult day care centres, waste management companies, recyclers, and PVC converters to recycle single-use PVC medical devices into long life products used in healthcare.
Each partner plays a crucial role in the project: VinylPlus supplies the waste collection material, trains the healthcare personnel, and has developed a handheld NIR scanner to ensure that only REACH-compliant waste is recycled. The waste management company Renewi does the reverse logistics and supplies storage space. The plastic recycler Raff Plastics works with adult care centres to dismantle any non-PVC parts and processes the waste into high quality raw material. After processing, the waste is then converted by Vescom into wall covering providing the hygiene, safety and the long-lasting resistance needed by hospitals.
Healthcare
Recycling
Sustainability
Circularity
Plastic
COVID-19 has highlighted the crucial role played by single-use plastic medical devices in the prevention and control of infection in hospitals. The surge in the need of such disposable items has shed light on the challenges of properly managing and discarding them after use. Properly sorting and recycling the non-infectious plastic waste can both significantly reduce the environmental impact of hospitals and their operational costs.
Market studies show PVC is the single most used polymer for disposable medical devices such as masks, tubing and bags. Approximately 30% of plastic based medical devices are manufactured in PVC. Importantly, market studies also show that PVC will remain the material of choice in the years to come. Successful recycling depends on volume, so it makes sense to start with the most used plastic.
PVC is easily recyclable due to the polymer’s chemical composition and formulation versatility. As PVC can be made rigid and soft, it is also possible to manufacture mono-polymer/monolayer products – another key to successful recycling. This is in contradiction to many non-PVC devices, which are often multi-polymer/multi-layer products that cannot be mechanically recycled.
Being colorless, odorless and transparent, medical grade PVC waste is sought after by recyclers and plastic converters, as it can be turned into a high valuable resource for a wide variety of applications. An example is vinyl wall covering, which can easily incorporate the high quality regrind PVC. At the end of its service life (>10 years), the wall covering can be recycled and used in new wall covering or other building products.
Hospitals are currently being designed with “healing architecture”. Healing architecture includes light ingress, navigation around the hospital and recreational zones. PVC allows for integration of signage, zone boundaries and even art into flooring and wall covering. PVC enable the patients, staff and visitors to easily find their way around, and make the hospital accessible, welcoming and aesthetically pleasing. Through an environmentally benign process, PVC waste collected at Belgian hospitals are turned into recyclate incorporated in new wall coverings. The human factor is crucial to make the recycling of plastic based medical devices a success. We have experienced that the successful implementation of PVC recycling schemes in hospitals is mainly driven by the nurses, who see the mountains of plastic waste generated every day from patient treatment and are increasingly conscious of the many detrimental sanitary and environmental consequences linked to the incineration of this waste. Facing the daily challenge to provide health with minimum sanitary and environmental harm, the nurses very often welcome solutions helping them to reduce the negative impacts of their practice. Furthermore, healthcare professionals already recycle plastic at home and therefore find it a natural progression to do it at their workplace.
Collecting medical devices for recycling is an extra task, so it is important that nurses are convinced that the work they do gives positive value for people and the environment. Experience from a PVC recycling scheme in South Africa show exactly this aspect: there, collected PVC based medical devices are recycled into school shoes for children who live in extreme poverty.
In the EU, soft PVC recyclate has the potential to be transformed into many durable products, which are used in the healthcare sector, such as rehabilitation equipment or colourful wall covering, as in our project.
By collaborating with local adult day care centers for dismantling the waste, our project is giving the opportunity for persons with disabilities to develop their skills and foster their active participation in the circular economy. In this way the project can be regarded as inclusive when it comes to involvement of persons with disabilities.
The project can also be regarded as inclusive in terms of affordability. Hospitals are constantly suffering from budget cuts. By directing a significant portion of their waste to our free to use recycling scheme instead of disposing it through more expensive waste management routes, the hospitals save money to create a better working environment and develop a more attractive workplace for the staff.
The hospitals are key partners of this project. They selectively sort the PVC waste to generate high quality and safe recyclates. Thanks to the financing by VinylPlus, all the waste that is been collected in this recycling scheme is diverted from costly waste management systems, creating a financial benefit for these civil society organisations. Another benefit for the hospitals is a reduction of the environmental impact (carbon footprint) of their operations.
The project is based on a value chain collaboration between industrial actors able to address the issue of management of medical PVC waste. Co-operation among the various companies in the value chain is one of the main pillars for a circular economy. The cooperation with Raff plastics, a specialist in PVC recycling, and Renewi – which is a full solution provider for any hospital waste is key. For a high quality recyclate, one needs a good recycling process but also a high-quality, stable flow of feedstock. The cooperation between the partners has allowed to produce high quality and stable flow feedstock.
Plastic industry knowledge, plastic process engineering, supply chain management, logistics, artificial intelligence expertise and waste regulations have all been knowledge fields and know-how to make this process a success. These various know-hows have been shared among the partners from the very beginning of the project to develop a well-functioning recycling scheme.
Our project has demonstrated it is possible to safely turn short-lived medical devices from 10 hospitals into durable, high-quality products for the healthcare sector. With more than 30 hospitals on the waiting list, we have managed to engage the Belgian healthcare community in the circular transition urgently needed for this sector.
The project has also documented that the collecting and recycling of medical devices helps hospitals to reduce their CO2 emissions. A lifecycle assessment of the climate impacts has shown that each kg of PVC waste recycled allows to save 3 kg of CO2 emissions vs. incineration.
Existing plastic recycling scheme in the health sector is mainly related to medical packaging and make use of so-called advanced or chemical recycling where the plastic is chemically broken down at high temperatures into basic building blocks that can be used as raw materials. Our project collects single use medical devices that have been used on noninfectious patients for a short time, and mechanically recycles them after use in products that go back to the hospital. Making use of environmentally benign processes such as room temperature grinding, mechanical recycling is the preferred recycling process for plastics because it leads to much less primary energy use and much lower greenhouse gas emissions than chemical recycling.
This project builds a recycling loop that is free of hazardous additives. Only PVC devices including additives that are not classified in the European chemical regulation Reach, are recycled. Through a partnership with an Italian start-up (Phoenix RTO), machine learning algorithms have been used to develop an infrared scanner able to sort out the PVC waste containing hazardous additives (ortho-phthalates). Not available on the market yet when the project was started, this scanner ensures that only REACH-compliant PVC is recycled.
The approach taken in the project is based on a value chain collaboration between industrial actors able to address the issue of management of medical PVC waste. Co-operation among the various companies in the value chain is one of the main pillars for a circular economy. The cooperation with Raff plastics, a specialist in PVC recycling, and Renewi – which is a full solution provider for any hospital waste is key.
For a high quality recyclate, one needs a good recycling process but also a high-quality, stable flow of feedstock. A specific type of PVC-waste from one single hospital is not sufficient to make the system sustainable. That is why we draw on a combined feedstock of a hospital network. Hospitals are more organizing themselves in network. They rely on logistics hubs to do the distribution. Integrating reverse logistics into existing flows greatly help to take the volume issue in waste management.
Already today, hospitals in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada collect PVC medical devices for recycling. Plastic-based medical devices are found in hospitals and other health facilities all around the globe, so the potential is huge. Our project could be replicated in many other countries which have environmentally responsible plastic recyclers and plastic converters that could turn the plastic waste into safe, long-life products used in healthcare settings.
The demand for quality healthcare is expected to rise in the future due to growing incomes in many countries, ageing populations in others, and a global population expected to reach 9 billion in 2050. Moreover, new epidemics cannot be excluded, and experience shows how these can create a lot of healthcare plastic waste. Plastic-based medical devices are essential to face these challenges, but their use pose a new challenge that can already be seen today: plastic waste often ends up in the environment. By collecting and recycling non-infectious medical devices into useful products, hospitals help solve the challenge of plastic waste.
