By Arash Arabasadi, VOA
Six hospitals of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) have new machines that turn used PPEs into blocks of reusable material for manufacturing.
The Thermal Compaction Group Environment Director Mathew Rapson said the machine addresses a growing global concern.
“We have now a number of hospitals using our machines specifically to take out the plastics and also the face mask wastes from the current pandemic,” Rapson explained.
Items like face masks, gowns, and curtains that are central to safeguarding frontline health workers have created thousands of tons of waste. Instead of incinerating or just tossing these into landfills, the Welsh company cooks them for about an hour, yielding a 20-kilogram block of solid blue reusable material.
The Environmental Services Association’s Stephen Freeland says that Britain’s waste problem is much bigger than PPEs.
“There has been an increase in the use of PPE’s in all of Britain’s whereabouts but the waste management system has coped. It’s a very resilient system. We are not talking about huge volumes of material that we are particularly handling here, compared to what the government is handling for the UK [United Kingdom] per year,” Freeland said.
According to government figures, Britain produces about 220 million metric tons of waste each year, so PPEs are just a tiny fraction of that.
Still, the thermal compaction blocks are already in use to make tool boxes and school chairs. The company says 1100 NHS hospitals see the equipment giving new life to plastic otherwise destined for the landfill.
