HEALTHCARE | INNOVATION
“Together, these activities underline that medical
PVC recycling is no longer theoretical. With the right material choices and systems in place, it is already working,” said VinylPlus Healthcare, and this provides a solid foundation for the next stage of its recycling activities.
Polyolefins pilot While PVC continues to be the high-volume plastic material in medical devices, polyolefins are the dominant single-use plastics for packaging of devices and pharmaceuticals, followed by PET. The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) recently published a case study that throws light on unlocking recycling potential in this area, with a particular focus on sorting waste streams. It said that following on from the first pilot in the Nether- lands, which demonstrated the technical feasibility of manual sorting, this second-phase study tested automated sorting technologies under real-world conditions in Germany. The trial was done in collaboration with Universitätsklinikum Bonn (UKB) and sorting technology group Tomra and assessed whether industrial-scale systems can reliably sort healthcare plastic packaging waste
with the accuracy and throughput needed for sustainable recycling. In the second phase of the pilot study, healthcare plastic waste collected from hospital operations was processed at the Tomra test centre in Mülheim-Kär- lich, Germany, where ballistic separation into rigid and flexible fractions was followed by optical sorting into PE, HDPE, PP, and PET streams. This phase scaled up the process by testing automated sorting of all material types found in rigid and flexible plastics, while assessing material purity under real-world conditions. HPRC said the trial provided insights into technical performance, contamination risks, and opportunities for improving pretreatment steps, helping to define best practices for scalable recycling of healthcare plastics. HPRC said: “This study has demonstrated proof
of principle that healthcare packaging materials, collected within a hospital environment, can be sorted using commercial waste handling process- es.” But some challenges became apparent in the pilot study, such as differences in waste item size and multi-component/multi-material design. HPRC said that sorting efficiency in the rigid plastics fraction was 45% and the remaining 55%
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