Trash to treasure

Administrators at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston firmly believe that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. As a result, this month the hospital is starting a pilot program that could potentially take a common hospital trash item and turn it into a bit of profit.

The material in question is so-called blue wrap material that is consumed in large quantities by operating rooms. Blue wrap is the blue bubble wrap material that surgical instruments come wrapped in. The hospital hopes to save and sell the blue wrap for reuse rather than constantly throw the product into the general waste stream. If successful, the hospital would like to see a double benefit: reducing the amount of its hauled trash, and getting some amount of cash back.

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“We use a lot of it,” noted Guillermo “Bill” Banchiere, director of environmental services at the 1,000-bed hospital, the largest in the state.

As Banchiere’s title would imply, Mass. General is serious about recycling and about saving or making money off its trash. Since 2007 the hospital has launched a series of recycling programs that target everything from paper and cardboard, to plastics, batteries, electronics, construction demolition material and some chemicals. His role is to work with staff, patients and guests alike to think green when it comes to consuming hospital resources.

How successful Mass. General will be at actually making money remains to be seen. The largest returns go to those hospitals that band together in programs, said Stefanie Feldman, account development manager at Waste Management, a solid waste and recycling company with facilities in several states.

“To make it worth your while, you need a lot of it,” Feldman said of the blue wrap material. “It is very much like polystyrene – it has a lot of bulk, but not a lot of weight.”

[See also: Healthcare leaders discuss greening the supply chain, lowering costs]

To further illustrate her point, Feldman said when waste management companies talk about a lot, they mean truck loads or tons. When an individual hospital tries to save and sell blue wrap, it is likely talking about bags.

“They might have 25 bags of material, each weighing less than one pound,” Feldman said.

Still, hospitals shouldn’t be discouraged from trying to profit from some of their trash. There are three points to making it work, Feldman said: focus on medical equipment that can be decontaminated and reused and operating room materials such as blue wrap that can be reprocessed; allocate proper space for separators and storage; and band together with other medical facilities in the area to generate the items in bulk.

Of course, all of these sound easier than they are. Recycling efforts are already challenging at the city-based Mass. General Hospital, where storage space for recyclables is very hard to come by. Adding more separation containers won’t be easy, nor will it be easy to find space in the operating rooms to hold items until they are collected later.

“We don’t have the footprint that a non-city hospital has,” Banchiere said. “We have to get very creative in how we reorganize operations to create space.”

Still, the hospital has done a good job of it so far, now keeping approximately 15 percent of the trash it generates out of the waste stream and into recycling programs. The hospital gets cash back for all of the paper and cardboard picked up by vendors, and the other recycling efforts result in trash fee reductions.

In the first five years of the program, Banchiere said the hospital has recycled approximately 6.2 million pounds of paper; 3.7 million pounds of cardboard; and 408,572 pounds of plastics, bottles and cans.

While 15 percent is a significant amount, the hospital’s goal is to eventually recycle or reuse 25 percent of all resources consumed. That will require more new initiatives, and more behavioral modification, Banchiere noted.

“Next, we will work with our vendors, and look for ways to compost food waste from the cafeteria,” Banchiere said. A committee has also been formed to look for recycling opportunities in the hospital’s research area.

In the meantime, the hospital has also created a committee to investigate virtually every area of the building. Committee members will observe how staff and patients use and discard resources, and look for ways to encourage desired behaviors that will promote recycling and reduce waste at every turn.

For inspiration, they can look to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. That hospital partnered with other healthcare facilities in the Milwaukee region to collect and sell blue wrap. In August, the hospital reported diverting more than 5 tons of blue wrap from the waste stream, or 6 percent of its total trash for that month.

Waste Management in Milwaukee handled the material and sent it to Becker Plastics in Neehan, Wis. There, the blue wrap was turned into plastic pellets and sent to end users that would make new products from them, including new blue wrap.