The Impact of Recycling Biohazardous Waste in A Circular Economy

As industries around the world strive to lower their carbon footprints, biohazardous waste recycling is emerging as a key area for improvement. In healthcare and life sciences, the handling of clinical, infectious, or biohazard disposal waste presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Historically, the treatment of biohazardous plastics involved incineration, autoclaving, and landfill—processes that not only generate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also destroy the plastic, making it unrecyclable.

Innovation in onsite biohazardous  waste recycling technologies, such as GENERATIONS, has opened the door to recycling previously untreatable biohazardous plastics. By converting waste into recyclable flakes, this technology significantly reduces both waste and carbon emissions. But beyond stopping this material from going to landfill, what additional impact can this now recyclable material have? This blog will focus on how reintroducing recycled biohazardous plastics into the manufacturing cycle can help reduce supply chain emissions and reliance on fossil fuel-dependent virgin polymers, a crucial aspect of biomedical disposal waste and clinical waste collection.

Why Recycling Biohazardous Plastics Matters

The environmental impact of plastic waste is well-documented. Virgin plastic production is an energy-intensive process that relies on the extraction and refining of fossil fuels. Each step in the production chain—from raw material extraction to final product creation—contributes heavily to the emission of CO₂. On top of this, the end-of-life treatment for plastic, often incineration or landfill, only adds to the environmental burden.

Recycling biohazardous plastics offers a way to cut down on both waste and emissions. By using technologies like GENERATIONS to safely disinfect and shred biohazardous waste, these plastics can be reintroduced into the economy as alternative materials for manufacturing, replacing the need for virgin plastics.

Carbon Action, an independent carbon consultancy firm, calculated that for every tonne of recycled polymer recovered from biohazardous waste treated by GENERATIONS, 2,104.52 kg of CO₂e are avoided compared to the production of virgin plastics. This represents a 91.12% reduction in carbon emissions—an enormous opportunity for carbon savings when applied at scale, particularly for regulated medical waste treatment companies.

How the GENERATIONS Process Enables Recycling

Traditional methods such as incineration make recycling impossible by turning waste into ash, while onsite options such as autoclaves can damage polymers or make them impossible to separate due to thermal warping. In contrast, GENERATIONS uses a non-thermal shredding and disinfection process that converts biohazardous waste into clean flake material. This recyclable flake can be separated using normal recycling techniques and used as a feedstock for new plastic products, avoiding the carbon-intensive processes involved in virgin plastic production.

The process works as follows:

• Biohazardous waste is shredded and disinfected onsite, ensuring that it is safe to handle.
• The resulting flake material is collected by a recycling partner and can be separated into various types of polymers such as polypropylene, polyethylene, and polystyrene, allowing for recycling into a wide range of new products.
• This avoids the need for fossil fuel extraction, polymerization, and the energy-intensive steps of creating virgin plastics—making a significant impact in biohazardous waste recycling efforts.

Real-World Impact of Recycling Biohazardous Plastics

The potential impact of recycling biohazardous plastics is significant, especially in industries that generate large amounts of waste, like healthcare. According to My Green Lab, the healthcare sector alone produces approximately 14.6 million tonnes of biohazardous waste per year. If even 1% of this waste were recycled, it would result in an annual reduction of over 138,000 tonnes of CO₂e emissions. This is equivalent to the carbon sequestration capacity of over a million trees over 100 years.

For example, Dairygold, a large agricultural cooperative in Ireland, has successfully implemented GENERATIONS technology to treat and recycle their laboratory plastics. This initiative has not only reduced their carbon footprint but also turned what was once waste into a valuable resource for their manufacturing processes. This type of initiative is a model for other industries to follow.

Circular Economy Benefits

Recycling biohazardous plastics doesn’t just reduce emissions—it contributes to the creation of a circular economy. In a traditional linear economy, products are made, used, and then discarded, often through incineration or landfill. By contrast, a circular economy keeps materials in use for as long as possible, extracting maximum value from them before safely recycling or repurposing them.

Using recycled biohazardous plastics can reduce the need for virgin plastic production, cutting emissions at multiple stages of the plastic lifecycle. Additionally, reintroducing these recycled materials into the economy reduces the environmental impact associated with waste disposal, such as the harmful byproducts of incineration and landfills—key aspects in improving clinical waste collection and biomedical disposal waste practices.