Recycling Week 2022: How is Curo helping NHS Trusts and Health Boards become more sustainable with clinical waste management
At Curo, we’re constantly putting effort into our technology to help NHS Trust’s and Health Boards become more sustainable when it comes to clinical waste management. Clinical waste has become a hospital’s highest financial and environmental cost and the storage, treatment and disposal of clinical waste is now a global concern for the healthcare sector. Curo is on a mission to change that. Read on to find out how we’re helping the NHS and Health Boards make a difference when it comes to waste management.
What is the current waste management process?
The current waste management process used by the NHS poses many environmental and financial risks. Currently, the NHS outsources the disposal of its clinical waste to external providers where it is collected weekly by diesel-fuelled lorries and transported miles off-site for disposal. In addition to this, once the waste is collected it then has to be either incinerated or autoclaved before being taken to landfill, therefore producing significant costs and generating carbon emissions.
How can the NHS be more sustainable?
Being a major producer of carbon emissions in England, the NHS has been set the challenge of becoming the world’s first net zero carbon health service through the Greener NHS programme. There are many things that NHS Trusts can do to be more sustainable including; using re-useable equipment and avoiding plastics in medical supplies.
From looking at the current process of clinical waste management, it’s clear that something needs to be done to reduce carbon emissions and stop financial costs from soaring, and we can be the solution.
How can Curo help?
Instead of transporting waste to landfill or incineration, our aim is to eliminate the carbon footprint of medical and clinical waste, keeping it out of landfill permanently, re-using waste sustainably and reducing the transportation costs both to the Trust and the planet.
Curo dramatically reduces waste costs which will save the NHS millions of pounds each year. The costs and times they save can be reinvested back into the NHS and could equate to 7,900 new nurses, 198 million patient appointments or 2.6 million ambulance deployments.
As well as helping the NHS reduce their carbon emissions and save money, Curo is also enabling them to take full control of the clinical waste process by providing valuable data including the weight, type of waste, its carbon reduction and the different weight categories which is a requirement for trusts to submit annually as part of their regulatory requirements to the Department of Health.
Want to speak to the Curo team about our sustainable solution to medical waste? Get in touch