A tonne of PPE is being recycled at Cornwall's main hospital every month
Bosses are hoping to bring in reusable face masks into surgical areas
It has been revealed that around a tonne of PPE is being recycled at Cornwall's main hospital every month.
10,000 surgical face masks are being used every day across Treliske in Truro, St Michael's in Hayle and the West Cornwall in Penzance.
Back in December the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust became the first in the UK to start sustainably recycling used kit.
A special remoulding machine is used to turn the PPE into other plastic items, such as car bumpers. There are also plans to start producing other items locally such as litter pickers and sunglasses.
Treliske is one of five sites across the country to be using the technology, developed by a company in Cardiff.
Bosses at RCHT have now revealed they would like to move away from the disposable PPE and bring in reusable face masks and gowns into their surgical areas, to help reduce the amount of single-use plastic.
"To reduce our PPE in general, right back when we declared a climate emergency back in October 2020, we issued all of our staff with a reusable mask, and that was for non-clinical areas.
"We're hoping very shortly to move along to reusable masks for clinical areas too.
"Moving away from single-use plastic and PPE obviously in a hospital, would be a really good step forward for us.
"Obviously it's always good to stop waste from the source, so if we can never use the PPE in the first place and use re-usables, that is definitely the route that we would like to go down."
Roz Davies, RCHT Care Group General Manager
How does it work?
The Sterimelt technology melts single-use polypropylene plastics.
These blocks are then later converted into new products such as bottles, bins and toolboxes, beginning a cycle of continual reprocessing, a circular economy.
“The Sterimelt unit turns your waste into a commodity. By reducing waste, it reduces the carbon footprint, meaning less lorries on site and transportation, creating a cleaner, greener future for the NHS.”
Mathew Rapson, from TCG