On 06 april, together with the LDE students from the Sustainable Hospitals interdisciplinary thesis lab and Kim van Nieuwenhuizen, academic coordinator for the lab, we visited GreenCycl and Van Straten Medical, two companies in Utrecht focusing on innovation and sustainability in the field of health care. We were hosted by Bart van Straten, director of Van Straten Medical, founder of GreenCycl and researcher at TU Delft.
Hospitals account for 7-8% of the country’s CO2 emissions, most of the emissions being related to the incineration of single use medical waste. Furthermore, the throwaway culture is costly and far from circular. From 2011, Bart van Straten has been working on improving the circularity of medical instruments. He was the first in 2018 to develop a sterilization and recycling process for hospital instruments. Since then Bart has been working on making more of this kind of circular applications in the care, such as the reuse of mouth masks during the Covid time or the recycling of PP wrapping paper.
During our visit, we first were given an introduction from Bart who explained his vision and research on circular models for the healthcare industry. We then got a full tour of the installations, from the warehouse where medical waste is brought and where plastic waste is disinfected, shredded and melted to create new instruments. We also visited the workshop where metallic instruments are recycled into metal plates to form new metal trays. Everyone was very enthusiastic to see up close a real circular process.
This was a great and informative experience, thank you Bart and good luck for your future projects!
