Rhode Island Hospital to begin recycling blue wrap material used in operating rooms

Rhode Island Hospital is taking recycling to the next level.

For some time, Lifespans' other two, smaller hospitals, Newport and The Miriam, have been repurposing a common material used in the operating room, which is normally not recyclable. For it's largest facility, Rhode Island Hospital, more planning and new equipment had to be in place to make recycling blue wrap work.

"Blue wrap is a material that is a sterile barrier," said Monica Anderson, director of community relations and corporate citizenship at Lifespan.

"It protects the instrumentation and many of these instruments are hundreds of thousands of dollars," added Loree Eysaman, vice president of Perioperative Services for Lifespan. "It's a large volume of waste that comes out of our operating rooms."

Making up about 20 percent of the OR waste. And then there's this: "Unfortunately no one in New England is recycling as far as we know but in Ohio and certainly out in California are there are more recyclers," said Anderson.

That's why at Rhode Island Hospital, they're now collecting all that blue wrap from the operating rooms and transporting it to a different area of the hospital where they use a compressor to make it into bales.

It is then stored locally, along with the blue wrap from the other two hospitals, to be transported to Ohio when enough is collected.

"And they melt this down and pelletize it and make it in to a number of materials, but the most popular material that I've seen is they pelletize it and make it into a playground barrier so then kids fall, it's sort of spongy material under the playground."

They expect to collect a ton of blue wrap a month, just from Rhode Island Hospital alone.

"When we can get it out of the waste stream, it's better for the environment and it's better for the state of Rhode Island," said Anderson.