Ascension Health joins Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council

The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC), St. Paul, Minnesota, has announced the appointment of Ascension, St. Louis, to its Healthcare Facility Advisory Board (HFAB), a role intended to help the council set priorities and steer the agenda toward its mission of inspiring and enabling sustainable, cost-effective recycling solutions for plastic products and materials used in the delivery of health care.

“As with any effort focused on solution development, customer input is critical,” says Peylina Chu, operations director of HPRC. “As the largest nonprofit health system in the U.S., Ascension is perfectly positioned to provide valuable insights on the kinds of improvements in healthcare sustainability to which HPRC is committed.”

Lois Sechrist, environmental sustainability analyst with Ascension, says, “As part of its Environmental Stewardship Program, Ascension has a focus on waste management and reduction. Reducing environmental impact, driving down costs and providing benefit to the communities in which our hospitals are located by creating recycling jobs and reducing the size of landfills needed are all important opportunities, and keeping products out of the landfill at the end of their useful life is a high priority.”

HPRC recently published a how-to guide, called HospiCycle, for hospitals seeking to recycle clean, noninfectious plastic products and packaging waste generated in their facilities. Additional initiatives aimed at enabling recycling of health care plastics include plastic recycling pilot study programs at select health care facilities, feasibility and cost analysis of industry transition from paper to plastic labels and resin testing of the technical limitation in plastics reprocessing.

HPRC is a private technical coalition of industry peers across the health care, recycling and waste management industries seeking to improve recyclability of plastic products used in health care. HPRC members include Baxter, BD, Cardinal Health, DuPont, Eastman Chemical Co., Halyard Health, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Ravago Manufacturing Americas and SABIC Innovative Plastics. The council convenes biannually at meetings hosted by an HPRC member that include facility tours to further learning and knowledge sharing opportunities through first-hand demonstration of best practices in sustainable product and packaging design and recycling processes.