Waste management of health products

To promote both maximum environmental and economic benefits from plastics, the European plastics industry supports an integrated approach to waste management for all plastic products. This means choosing the best, most appropriate mix of waste options, with the overall aim of preventing, as far as possible, plastics products from going to landfill at end-of-life.

For obvious hygiene reasons, i.e. body fluid contamination and the risk of infection, the most typical disposal route for used medical devices is incineration.

In today’s incinerators, dioxin formation from PVC is not a problem, as strict limits on dioxin emissions have been set under European Union Directive 2000/76/EC, one of several EU laws on dioxins, environment and health.

However, PVC products which have not been in contact with body fluids can be recycled, as demonstrated by the successful RecoMed initiative in the U.K.