Processing on site can cut costs

Speaking at an IHEEM healthcare waste management seminar held at London’s Guy’s Hopsital on 10 September, Liam Hogg, environmental and contracts manager at Skanska Facilities Services – which provides FM services to the Barts Health NHS Trust, and Terry Hewitt, MD of waste management specialist, Eurotec Environmental, described the planned installation early next year at the Trust’s Whipps Cross Hospital in Waltham Forest, of the NHS’s first Sterilwave on-site waste processing facility. Once installed, the system will enable the hospital to process permitted categories of clinical waste on site, significantly reducing the transport, administration, and compliance costs associated with using an external contractor. Eurotec hopes this could be the first of many such NHS installations. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

The joint presentation by Liam Hogg of Skanska and and Terry Hewitt of Eurotec Environmental followed an earlier presentation the same morning, during which Fiona Daly, sustainability manager at Barts Health NHS Trust, and Rachael Baldwin, who has the same role at Skanska, jointly described a number of the key waste minimisation and reduction initiatives the two organisations had collaborated on over the past 4-5 years, to both significantly reduce the amount of healthcare waste the Trust generates, and enable its more efficient and cost-effective disposal. The pair explained that all had been implemented since the Trust began working in partnership on waste with Skanska in 2011 in its PFI contract, and since 2013 in its non-PFI contract.

Eurotec Environmental, which was established in 2013, and is headquartered in Latchingdon in Essex, describes itself as ‘a leading pioneer in the on-producer site treatment of clinical waste’. As the seminar audience heard, the company has recently developed what it dubs ‘a ground-breaking process with the capability to process Infectious and Offensive waste categories on the producer site in a controlled, environmentally conscious manner’