Biomaterials can lower healthcare emissions and simplify waste management
Europe’s healthcare system produced more than 900, 000 tonnes of single-use plastic in 2023.
This plastic dependence is bitterly ironic. Plastic is incredibly harmful to our bodies and the food, water, and air we consume, undermining the health system’s mission to preserve our wellbeing.
Yet single-use plastics are hard to simply eliminate in healthcare. Throwaway containers, bags, and instruments maintain hygiene and prevent infection.
There is a solution: making disposable equipment biobased and biodegradable.
The plastics in our health system
In Europe, estimates say 36 percent of healthcare waste is plastic. 42% of this is incinerated.
The bulk of plastic use in healthcare happens in seven applications:
- fluid bags and tubing,
- gloves,
- rigid devices (like syringes),
- device packaging,
- personal protective equipment,
- wipes,
- pharmaceutical packaging.
These are dominated by oil-based plastics like polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polypropylene (PP), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC and polyurethane dominate these life-saving applications. None are biodegradable.
More often than not, single-use plastics from the healthcare sector end up in landfill.
Once in the soil, the single-use plastics that fill hospital environments will not break down for thousands of years. When they do disintegrate, they release harmful chemicals that inevitably enter the human food system.
When biomaterials help
One way to reduce plastic waste is to eliminate as many single-use products as possible.
Unfortunately, this is not an option in many medical applications. Single use products support hygiene and prevent infection.
Increasing recycling is another avenue to reduce waste. Hospitals do not recycle single-use petroleum plastics as much as they could for practical reasons, like the burdens of sorting and storage.
Finally, we can replace certain single-use petroleum plastics with single-use biomaterials instead.
Biomaterials are a general term for any material made using biological (and therefore renewable) rather than mined raw materials.
Plants, crustacean shells, and wood can be processed into thousands of different biomaterials with all kinds of properties, some of which match petroleum plastics on their safety and performance features.
Low-emissions, anti-landfill
Some biomaterials offer advantages in single-use applications that petroleum-based plastics cannot, such as a lower carbon footprint.
For biomaterials to maximise the sustainability of single-use healthcare items, however, they must be biodegradable or compostable. This means they can decompose safely and quickly once they are used.
There are already examples of biodegradable and biobased single use equipment on the market. The “biogown” by TerraLoam uses corn starch and biodegradable polymers to create gowns that degrade in open landfill over 12 to 18 months. Irish company HaPPE Earth specialises in biobased medical aprons made from maize that ‘disappears’ in around 8 weeks.
These are both examples of compostable personal protective equipment, meaning the biomaterials they are made from need no special facilities to decompose safely.
By contrast, biodegradable biomaterials must be sent to specially equipped industrial plants which offer the right heat and microbial conditions to turn the materials into water, carbon dioxide, mineral salts, and biomass.
In 2024, University of Maine researchers developed a biodegradable, biobased isolation gown using materials already made at a relatively large scale: paper and a biobased coating chemical known as VerdeCoat. Isolation gowns are worn by health workers attending patients under isolation and are often made from petroleum plastic polypropylene.
The researchers wanted biodegradable, biobased gown specifically designed to be sent to special industrial composting plants.
The advantage of industrially composting single-use items is that composting plants can systematically extract and recover valuable compounds from the material that can be re-used. This is something that could not happen if the apron was simply made to decompose out in nature.
What hospital products can go biobased?
There are immense opportunities for biobased swaps in our health systems. A recent report by the biobased industry association BB-REG-NEET on Britain’s public health system the NHS stated that at least 670 NHS contracts and 407 agreements for goods where biobased alternatives could serve just as well as conventional plastics.
Changing the materials in use across an entire sector like health is a challenging project, but pilot projects around the world are showing that it is possible.
University Hospitals Birmingham implemented biodegradable materials for certain pharma product packaging and food service containers. It reduced hospital waste sent to landfill by over 20%.
Finland has been looking to its forestry industry to bring down the plastic impact of its healthcare system.
Central Finland Central Hospital in Jyväskylä became a testing ground for wood-based healthcare materials under the Sami&Samu project, which ran from 2018 to 2021.
The trail did not limit itself to solid wood-based materials. It also tested antimicrobial and bioactive compounds taken from Finnish trees.
Surfaces of any kind – clothing, curtains, floors, and tables – can become incubators and carriers of disease when bacteria survive on them. In one test, a biobased antimicrobial coating was sprayed onto hospital privacy curtains. In addition, the hospital trialled fabric patient bags made from wood material, as well as wood-based coffee cups and salad plates in the canteen.
Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden has mounted a sustainable pilot project that proves how far sustainable alternatives can be integrated into healthcare. It has replaced many single-use medical devices with biodegradable alternatives. Surgical drapes are now made from biodegradable plastics, as well as certain medical packaging. Patient wristbands from plant-based materials have also been trialled.
An EU project has recently identified which hospital disposables could most easily be replaced with biobased alternatives.
The project found some ‘low-hanging fruit’ when it came to potential biobased switches. These were catering supplies, containers used at the bedside (for example, to collect urine samples), and some surgical single-use equipment like protective clothing and masks.
Pharmaceutical packaging is another area where biodegradable biomaterials have the potential to reduce environmental impact.
Collaboration between biomanufacturers and health providers can bring Public health systems are large-volume consumers that need reliable stock over the long term, making them ideal offtake customers that can lock in demand for biobased companies looking to scale.
Advanced applications
However, the more sensitive medical equipment, like syringes and blood bags, pose a bigger challenge for biobased swaps since they have stringent safety requirements.
Changing the materials used in highly regulated medical equipment can pose a huge administrative hurdle for hospitals. Yet options do exist, with a number of companies manufacturing biomaterials for medical uses.
Arkema Group for instance makes biopolymers that meet ISO 10993 regulations on medical devices that come into contact with the human body.
Arkema’s patented biopolymer, polyamide 11, is made from the castor bean. The company manufactures the basic polymer, which it sells onto companies that transform them into medical devices and other products.
The company says that its bean supply is grown on the poorest soil in India and does not compete with human food or contribute to deforestation.
Polyamide 11 can be made into single-use medical devices to replace surgical steel and petroleum-based plastics: tubing, IV bags, and balloon catheters (used to enlarge narrow openings in the body), are all end applications for the material.
The afterlife of medical disposables
All kinds of material – whether biobased or petroleum-based – can contaminate the environment if left in landfill. Ensuring a plan for end-of-life processing is therefore essential to reducing the environmental impacts of healthcare equipment.
For example, Arkema’s Polyamide 11 is not biodegradable but is recyclable. Arkema has acquired a recycling plant in Italy to recycle their customer’s waste into lower-spec, non-medical applications.
Like recyclable plastics, biodegradable bioplastics encounter gaps in end-of-life processing capacity. Sorting is time-consuming while collection and specialist end-of-life treatment facilities really depend on the state of local services. Bioplastic composting capacity remains patchy across the world.
However, modular composting systems can overcome the absence of centralised composting infrastructure for bioplastics. Dutch company Pharmafilter offers a small on-site anaerobic digestion system that takes in hospital waste and uses specialised microbes to decompose them. It is currently installed at five hospitals in the Netherlands, including its leading university medical centre.
Pharmafilter’s small-scale, on-site composting facilities demonstrate another advantage of using bioplastics and biomaterials: the composting facility they provide break down bioplastics but can also process a diverse range of materials including food waste, hazardous material like used bandages and syringes,and wastewater.
Using biobased alternatives in conjunction with an all-purpose industrial composting facility can therefore simplify hospital waste management procedures.
Changing the materials we use in the healthcare sector can seem a daunting task. However, we have already seen rapid changes in the material make-up of our healthcare systems.
Traditionally, glass, metals, ceramics, wood, and stone dominated medical equipment before widespread plastic adoption in the mid 20th century. With plastic pollution in the 21st century at crisis point, another material turning point for healthcare could be on the horizon.
