Dive Brief:
- The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council named Tracy Taszarek its executive director last month. The consortium undertakes projects to improve the economics, efficiency, quality and quantity of healthcare plastics collected for recycling.
- The group considers a range of technologies and outlets. Given a preponderance of flexible and multilaminate plastics in healthcare settings, chemical recycling opportunities continue to be an important area of attention for the group.
- Project focuses this year include increasing volumes of healthcare plastics collected for recycling regionally by adding more clinical sites, such as dental offices. The group also has projects related to improving sustainability procurement criteria and life cycle assessments used by hospitals to drive decisions about healthcare plastics and their disposal.
Dive Insight:
The industry-backed Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council is under new leadership in 2025 as it advances efforts to divert packaging waste from clinical settings.
HPRC was formed in 2010, with operations in North America and Europe. Current members include Amcor, Nelipak, Paxxus, Dow, Eastman, PureCycle and Plastic Ingenuity, along with medical device companies. Alison Bryant, communications director for HPRC, noted last year that global production of healthcare plastics was expected to reach 48 billion pounds by 2025.
Amcor, a major packaging company with a large healthcare business, has tried to improve the potential for recycling healthcare plastics through monomaterial innovations, including high-barrier medical laminates. The company has also worked on incorporating chemically recycled material into healthcare packaging.
“HPRC is seeking to affect plastic recycling from product design and manufacturing all the way through product use within the hospital and then to the downstream side of disposal and recycling,” Bryant said. “We've sort of been taking it stage by stage in that plastic life cycle, and looking at the barriers in each stage.”
Each year HPRC evaluates a number of different projects and discusses them with membership.
“We talk about what challenges the industry is facing, what challenges our hospitals are facing, and then our members pull together ideas and discuss scoping of different types of projects and areas where we can make an impact,” said Taszarek.
In the chemical recycling sector, Texas has been a popular hub for site development. For HPRC, chemical recycling research has been an ongoing effort.
Working in partnership with the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, last year HPRC launched a regional recycling program model initiative with the Houston Methodist hospital network, establishing collection pilots, identifying logistics partners and sortation needs, and seeking to leverage existing and new end markets for material.
At the end of the Houston project, HPRC wants to create a playbook detailing the setup process to replicate elsewhere.
“So for example, taking it to Chicago where it's a larger population, a larger area, more hospital facilities, where they could take that same program and put it all in place,” Taszarek said.
Chemical recyclers that are part of HPRC use different technologies and are looking for different types of and part of plastics. “So getting that material to the right locations is all a piece of that puzzle that they're working on,” she said.
