Why hospitals are beginning to reuse or recycle oxygen masks, IV bags, surgical tools they used to throw out - Action News
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Science

Why hospitals are beginning to reuse or recycle oxygen masks, IV bags, surgical tools they used to throw out

More hospitals are shifting away from single-use medical equipment to reusable PPE and surgical supplies and finding ways to recycle previously unrecyclable material, such as IV bags. Some doctors say it saves on costs and has environmental benefits.

Doctors, companies are finding ways to reuse or recycle more medical supplies

Canadian researchers looking for ways to cut down PPE waste

3 years ago
Duration 2:01
Across Canada, research engineers and physicians are developing recycling systems and pushing for more sustainable options to reduce hospital waste. Correction: March 10, 2021 | This story incorrectly says IV tubing is part of the PVC recycling program at St. Josephs Health Centre. In fact, its oxygen tubing that is part of that program.

It may not be intuitive, but safely reusing medical equipment that has been previously used by doctors or patients can help hospitals save on health care costs, prevent supply shortages and have beneficial knock-on effects for the whole population, say some doctors.

It could also potentially make a dent in the mountains of hospital waste generated each year. In Canada alone, non-hazardous hospital waste couldamount to nearly 300 tonnes a day.

Dr. Andrea MacNeill, a surgical oncologist at Vancouver General Hospital is one of several doctors across Canadatrying to make the shift from the single-use anddisposable equipment hospitals rely onto more reusable masks, gowns and surgical supplies.

They're also finding ways to recycle single-use items, such as oxygen masks and tubing andIV bags.

MacNeill, a clinical associateprofessor, is launching thePlanetary Health Care Lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver that willexamine the environmental impacts of health care. Sheacknowledges that patients often don't like the idea of using something that has already been used on another patient.

"There is an almost visceral reaction to the idea of reuse," she said. "I think we've been successfully marketed the notion that single-use consumables are safer from an infection prevention perspective, and there's very little, if any, data to back that up."

Conversely, she said, there's is a lot of data showing that reuse is safe when done properly, similar to using the same restaurant utensils as thousands of other patrons.

"There's no difference between that and using medical devices that have undergone safe-reuse protocols," MacNeill said.

And there are potential health and environmental benefits to doing so, she suggests.

Preventing equipment shortages

For one thing, reusable equipment could potentially prevent some of the supply problems seen when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit in early 2020.

At that time, some hospitals, long-term care homes and other front-line facilities faced dangerous shortages of personal protective equipment. Some reportedly even had to stop doing front-line work as a result.

WATCH | Ottawa paramedics faced shortage of PPE:

Ottawa paramedics facing shortage of PPE

4 years ago
Duration 7:02
Paramedics in Ottawa are lacking N95 masks and say they cant do their job without proper protection. Its not clear when they will get more respirators. They are trying to find alternative sources of masks that meet provincial standards.

"Part of the reason for that is that we have developed increasing reliance on single-use items, so disposable N95 [respirators], disposable gowns," MacNeill said.

That was less of a problem at Vancouver General Hospital, where she works, which was well stocked with reusable gowns and respirators.

"Because it's a lot easier to scale up your reuse cycles, so your laundering of your gowns oryour replacement of the filters of your reusable respirators, than it is to actually manufacture more of something,"MacNeill said.

She said supply-chain disruptions such asthe ones seen during the pandemic can be expected to become more frequent with future pandemics and climate change-related catastrophes, and the health-care system needs to find ways to address such vulnerabilities.

Dr. Ali Abbass, an anesthesiologist and chief of environmental stewardship and sustainability at St. Joseph's Health Centre in Toronto, holds an oxygen mask, being recycled as part of a PVC recycling program. (Yuri Markarov/ Unity Health Toronto)

"One of those is focusing more on reusable supplies rather than single-use consumables."

Since the start of the pandemic, more research has gone into ways to clean and reuse PPE, such as N95 masks, and some provincial governments have invested in reusable gear. For example, the Manitoba government ordered a million reusable N95 masks that can we worn up to 30 times.

The shortages have also prompted some hospitals to stockpile used masks in case they run out of new ones and need to clean and reuse them.

Early prototype designs of reusable N95 masks being designed by Precision ADM in Winnipeg. The government of Manitoba has ordered one million, one of several efforts underway to move away from single-use equipment and toward reusable medical supplies. (Submitted by Precision ADM)

Reusecan save money

Reusing supplies rather than throwing them away can also cut costs, and some of those savings can be reinvested in patient care.

Since December 2018, St. Joseph's Health Centrein Toronto has been reusing disposable items such asfingertip oxygen sensors and single-use surgical tools such as harmonic scalpels and trocars for laparoscopic operationsthat are normally used oncebefore being thrown away. Now, instead of being trashed, they're cleaned, sterilized, tested and repackaged by a company called Stryker Sustainability Solutions.

The company says each deviceis individually tested after processing,must meet a U.S. Food and Drug Administration requirement to be"substantially equivalent" to a brand new deviceand carries a warrantyand liability policy similar to those from the original manufacturer. In Canada, eachreprocessed devicemust get a medical device licence before it can be reused.

In 2020, TorontoSt. Joseph's Health Centre estimates it was able to reprocess about 900 devices and purchase 600 reprocesseddevicesat a discount, saving about $20,000, including $4,000 in waste-hauling costs, said Dr. Ali Abbass, an anesthesiologist and chief of environmental stewardship and sustainability at St. Joseph's.

WATCH | Dr. Ali Abbass shows some ways his hospital is cutting medical waste

Hospitals are finding new ways to reduce medical waste

3 years ago
Duration 1:45
Anesthesiologist Dr. Ali Abbass shows how they're reducing operating room waste at St. Joseph's Health Centre in Toronto

Normally many of the metal items need to go in a sharps container, which is expensive to haul away.

"If you put it in the Stryker collection container, it's free," said Abbass, who reached out to the company after hearing about its programs at U.S. hospitals.Abbass said the program is relatively new in Canada after being approved by federal regulators.

The system also reduces environmental costs, as Stryker can reprocess each device five to seven times reducing the number of new ones thatneedto be made, Abbass said.

"To me, every hospital in the country should implement it."

When reuse isn't possible, recycling may be

Of course, not all materials are durable enough to becleaned and reused.

That has been the case for disposablemedical masks along with IV bags, oxygen masks and oxygen tubing.

For those, recycling may be an option but one that hasn't been widely used.

Abbass says that's likely in part due tothe "ick factor," where hospital waste is perceived to be infectious.

It's also often hard to find a market even for household plastics that have been recycled let alone recycled medical plastics.

"There's lots of factors, I think that are in flux," Abbass said. "And one has to keep following up, I find, to see whether something that isn't recyclable may now be or vice versa.

Around 2012, Abbass heard of a program in Australia that recycled items made of PVC, such as IV bags, oxygen masks and oxygen tubing. He got in touchto ask how it worked, then found a recycler in Ontario, Norwich Plastics, willing to give it a try.

A pilot program for recycling those items from patients who aren't infectious started at St. Joseph'sin 2016.

Dr. Andrea MacNeill, a surgical oncologist at Vancouver General Hospital, says switching from single-use to reusable medical supplies in hospitals can cut down on the harmful environmental effects of medical waste and help hospitals avoid some of the shortages they've faced on the pandemic. (Andrea MacNeill)

It's already generated several thousand pounds of recycled PVC that's being used to make items such as automotive parts, garden hoses and highway sound barriers.

Abbass said his hospital alone uses 400,000 IV fluid bags and 70,000 oxygen delivery devices a year. He thinks the majority of them could be sent for recycling if staff are educated about the process and recycling bins are placed in the right places.

The program is gradually being expanded to other parts of the hospital and, in partnership with The Vinyl Institute of Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada,has launched at six other hospitals in the Greater Toronto Area, with plans to expand to B.C.

Mask recycling ramping up

Medical masks have not been widely recycled, but some efforts have started up recently. They have been collected for recycling at schools in Ontario and Quebec, for example.

Collection of masks from some Vancouver hospitals also started in February, as part of a collaboration between Burnaby, B.C.-based mask manufacturer Vitacore and Ravi Selvaganapathy, director of McMaster University's Centre of Excellence in Protective Equipment and Materials in Hamilton. It expects to have collected 200,000 masks by the end of March and aims to expand to hospitals across the country over the next four months.

Selvaganapathy's lab will receive 25,000. They'll be melted down for recycling, and the research team is experimenting with pulling them into thin fibres.

"Those can be then chopped up into little bits and can be used as filler materials, for example, in concrete and composites," he said.

They're testing the strength of concrete that contains recycled masks to see if it's stronger than regular concrete.

He sees the potential to integrate recycled plastic from masks into all kinds of other materials used in sports equipment or aircraft. "They could be buried in all of these products," he said.

Emissions impact

MacNeill says the ideal situation is to never have to worry about whether something goes into the recycling bin or garbage canand whether the recycled material can be sold and made into something else.

"My ideal system is absolutely zero waste," she said, "because what we are purchasing is entirely purpose-built reusable instruments that are actually designed for durability and quality."

She recognizes that's a challenge, given that hospitals have been relying heavily on single-use medical supplies since the 1980s in response to the products being marketed as safer and more convenient.

"Nobody was thinking about what the impacts were of manufacturing all of these plastics and of ultimately disposing of them," she said.

Now, even health regulators in the U.S. factor inthe use of disposables when considering a hospital for accreditation, she said.

The World Health Organizationestimates that high-income countries currently generate an average of0.5 kg of hazardous waste and more than three kilograms of non-hazardous waste per hospital bed per day. Canada had91,000 hospital beds in 2018-2019, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, suggesting its hospitals could be producing 273 tonnes of non-hazardous waste per day.

MacNeill notes thatwaste and pollution generated by the health care industry is unhealthy for everyone.

"We have a moral imperative to first do no harm," MacNeill said."And that includes to the rest of the population who's not currently a patient, but who is potentially being adversely affected by the implications of the care we're delivering right now."

WATCH |The operating roomanesthetic gasses hurting the environment:

The anesthetic gasses hurting the environment from operating rooms

5 years ago
Duration 3:04
The health-care industry in North America has a pollution problem. One study showed it generates more than eight per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. But a few changes in the operating room could go a long way in helping the planet.

The greenhouse gas emissions from health care are also an issue, she said.

"If we could decarbonize health care, it would be nearly equivalent to eliminating air travel. So we actually have a massive opportunity."

That's something the National Health Service in England has acknowledged by committing to produce net zero emissions.

MacNeill is confident it's something Canada can also achieve, too. "One hundred per cent, we can get there."

Corrections

  • An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that single-use surgical tools that could be reprocessed for reuse by Stryker Sustainability Solutions included drill bits. In fact, drill bits can be placed in the company's bins for recycling, but can't be reprocessed.
    Mar 08, 2021 5:22 PM ET
  • An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that IV tubing is being recycled at St. Joseph's Health Centre in Toronto. In fact, it is oxygen tubing that is being recycled.
    Mar 08, 2021 11:47 AM ET

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