It's possible to reuse hearts and other major organs, but doctors are still throwing away valuable equipment that could be given a new life. Medical professionals are finally trying to bring modern medicine into the environmental fold, safely and affordably.
As much as I consider myself an environmentalist, it's easy to see why recycling hasn't been a priority in hospitals. Just looking at the sharps container in the doctor's office is a reminder that we're not talking about aluminum cans here. We're talking about sterile objects and transmissible diseases. Besides, disposability has been an economic advantage for medical device manufacturers. They don't really have an incentive to make permanently reusable probes. Plus, the government doesn't track medical waste volume and content, making it tough to know what we're even talking about, although an old estimate put the number at millions of tons per year.
These formidable challenges make headway in this space all the more amazing. Writing about the problem in the New York Times this week, Ingfei Chen describes how Johns Hopkins School of Medicine surgeon Martin Makary has been urging medical centers to recycle medical devices after he noticed a trash bin full of unused equipment in an operating room. He began to look into device recycling.
In order for medical equipment, such as imaging catheters, orthopedic drill bits and balloon inflation devices to be recycled, it has to be reprocessed, which involves cleaning, recalibrating, repackaging and resterilizing. Reprocessing can be done on many single-use, used and reusable devices.
Medical equipment producers have long questioned reprocessing, raising concerns about safety and the effect on the equipment's performance. But Chen reports that Makary and his colleagues combed the medical literature for patients harmed by reprocessed equipment and didn't find anything.
In addition, reprocessed equipment cost between 40 to 60 percent of what new ones would, which definitely helps in cash-strapped times. A quarter of American hospitals use reprocessed equipment.
Unfortunately, reprocessing usually just postpones a trip to the incinerator because there's only so much that can be done to prolong some equipment's life. A longer-term solution would be for medical device makers to develop permanently reusable products from durable materials like metal and glass. Perhaps smart hospital execs will see that such products make a sound investment. In the meantime, maybe medical equipment companies will pull an Amazon.com and get into the reprocessing business.
On the waste reduction side, Rafael Andrade, a thoracic surgeon at Fairview Hospitals and Clinics in Minneapolis, MN, leads an OR green team to reduce waste there. His group got extraneous components removed from sealed surgical kits, such as sterile plastic light handles, reducing the number of items in one kit from 44 to 27, saving $50 in expenses (PDF). Saving lives and saving the planet don't have to be mutually exclusive. We just need an injection of determination.
Photo: A sharps bin for used syringes. Credit: Sarah G
Tags: EWaste, Green Tech, Health, Waste and Recycling
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