The presence of plastic pipe is ubiquitous, but some might say its profile is low simply because plastic pipe is often out of sight, below ground or behind walls.

Yet plastic pipe connects Australia. It plays an essential and integral role in Australia’s built environment, the nation’s infrastructure, electricity transmission, agricultural irrigation, stock and domestic water supply and the mining and gas industries to name a few.

People who think plastic pipe is secondary to their lives might reflect on the fact that these products provide upwards of 85 per cent of the pipe infrastructure to major urban utilities for power and the reticulation of gas, water, and sewerage. The high proportion of plastic pipe and conduit in the delivery of these critical utilities reflects enormous confidence on the part of asset owners in the ability of these products to deliver long-term efficient performance.

But today, efficient performance is not enough. Given the widespread use of plastic pipes, it makes sense to ensure we better understand what we are dealing with.

Leading Vinyl Council and PIPA (Plastics Industry Pipe Association) member companies, Iplex and Vinidex, have recently published world-first product–specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for their entire range of plastic pipe products. What is an EPD and why did the companies make this decision?

In ourlatest article published in Sourceable.net, PIPA’s executive general manager, Mark Heathcote elaborates on the drivers leading to these two major PVC pipe manufacturers separately taking the decision to publish EPDs for all of their pipe products, how it benefits the construction process and what lessons other product suppliers may learn from their experience.

At the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation's Health and Environmental Sustainability Conference on 28 April, the world-reknown Australian horticulturalist, Jamie Durie OAM met with representatives of the PVC Recycling in Hospitals program.

On learning about what happens to medical waste, Jamie, a vocal environmentalist, enthusiastically lent his support to encourage more hospitals to join the program.

He discussed with staff from the Vinyl Council, Baxter Healthcare and recycler Welvic Ausutralia how PVC medical products can be recovered from hospitals and the collected material recycled into a range of new products.

It was particularly fitting for Jamie that the recycled PVC is currently being re-used in products such as garden hose!

Watch Jamie's shortvideo messageabout the program.

To learn more about the recycling program, including thebusiness casefor implementing it, check out ourrecycling pages.

Over the past five years or so, some 95 healthcare facilities across Australia and New Zealand have started to recycle PVC medical products and other recyclables used in the delivery of healthcare services. The PVC Recycling in Hospitals program has been something of a world first – now being adopted in the UK, North America and South Africa - driven by passionate medical staff concerned by the growing consumption and waste of resources in the healthcare sector.

Our program has shown the enormous will of staff to do at work what they do at home – recycle. It has paved the way to recover and recycle other plastics and materials from healthcare. However, working with these hospitals to put systems and infrastructure in place to allow recycling has highlighted some challenges in the design of these buildings.

When it comes to hospital development, waste management is not a top design priority (nor should it be compared to patient comfort and outcomes), but as a building type, hospitals generate significant - and growing - volumes of waste: food, plastics, metals, glass, paper and cardboard. And this waste generation represents a sizeable operational cost over the building lifetime.

The World Health Organisation has found that high income countries like Australia produce over 3.3 kg of waste per bed per day, 85 percent of which is generally non-hazardous / non-infectious waste. A metropolitan general hospital in the US is estimated to produce a whopping 10.7kg per occupied bed per day of which almost 8kg is general waste.

In part, this waste generation has been driven by improved infection control which has led to increasing adoption of single-use, disposal medical products. Much of this is plastic material and 30-40 percent of that is PVC. These items, such as oxygen masks and tubing, fluid solution bags, bottles and containers, are treated as general waste in Australia, and have traditionally gone to landfill at a cost to the hospital.

Our older hospitals were not designed to cater for this growth in waste. As we found in developing the PVC recycling program, buildings had insufficient floor space for placement of bins in medical areas; lacked interim storage space for bins of collected waste and had loading docks that were clearly struggling to cater for the growing volumes of various waste streams. In one case, the depot ceiling height was even too low to allow entry of today’s larger waste collection trucks!

If healthcare facilities are going to meet commitments to waste management principles, they need to implement comprehensive systems to facilitate segregation of wastes at source in medical areas and the safe movement of waste through the hospital to the loading dock for transportation away from the site.

Under current Australasian Health Facilities Guidelines, a typical 14m2 dirty utility room – the largest specification - in a general hospital might have space allowed for just two 240 litre bins, one of which would probably need to be for clinical waste. If hospitals are to collect and segregate waste streams effectively at source i.e. in the medical area, then appropriate space is required for suitable bins: clinical waste, PVC, general waste, and other recyclable streams. This has been a challenge for virtually every hospital we have worked with.

It requires forward thinking design of safe and efficient systems for collecting, handling, storing, transporting, treating, recycling and disposing of healthcare wastes. This encompasses:

• Location and size of waste storage rooms
• Holding areas (eg dirty utility rooms) sufficient for segregated waste streams close to where waste is generated
• Internal waste movement routes (separated from high people movement and sensitive areas)
• Layout and design of loading docks with space for balers and compactors, recycling bins, waste treatment, hazardous waste storage, bin and trolley cleaning, transport access etc

As recycling of consumables in healthcare grows, this means planning up front as hospitals upgrade or are built new, estimating waste generation volumes, types of waste and the types and numbers of bins to accommodate it, as well as identifying the departments that will recover and segregate waste streams for recycling.

Design of sustainable healthcare facilities today has come a long way in terms of infection control and improving comfort and outcomes for patients. But let’s make healthcare waste management a carefully integrated part of that system to avoid the potential public health and environmental consequences of waste generation.

We live in a chlorine economy

We live in a chlorine economy. And, no, it’s not all about vinyl.

Yes, vinyl is composed of two simple building blocks – one of which is chlorine (the other is ethylene, from natural gas). But chlorine, which is based on simple salt, is used in a very wide range of products far beyond those made of vinyl.

Chlorine is a key building block in everything from automotive components to firefighters’ clothing. You can find chlorinated compounds in wetsuits (neoprene rubber from chloropropene). It’s used for everything from water treatment to erasers (thio-chloride curing agents used in some rubbers).

These sectors depend on chlorine chemistry: health care, transportation, building and construction, defense and law enforcement, and the food and water sectors all rely on chlorine derivatives and chlorinated chemicals.

Chlorine is versatile, and it plays well with other chemicals to create some pretty cool stuff. In fact, did you know that chlorine chemistry plays a role in components for wind turbines and solar panels?

It’s also part of the chemistry in aerospace components and high-precision lasers and environmentally friendly coolants. All these products rely on chlorine chemistry and the multitude of chlorinated chemicals and compounds.

Here’s some other items that rely on chlorine chemistry at some point in the manufacturing process:

•     computers
•     smartphones
•     cosmetics
•     mirrors
•     window screens
•     mattress covers
•     blankets
•     nonstick cookware
•     sportswear
•     golf bags
•     artificial glass
•     guitar strings
•     bulletproof vests
•     tires
•     batteries

The Chlorine Tree, prepared by American Chemistry Council Chlorine Chemistry Division, shows the breath and scope of chlorine’s use and demonstrates just how critical the chemical is to manufacturing – and how it exists at the core of many products. Without it, what would you miss most?