The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) is thrilled to welcome the newest member, Brightmark, a global waste solutions company with a mission to reimagine waste.
“We are pleased to welcome Brightmark to HPRC,” shares Peylina Chu, Director of HPRC. “Their focus on tackling challenging waste streams and desire to recycle more healthcare plastics through their advanced recycling operations will bring great value to HPRC projects and help fulfill our vision that all healthcare plastics are safely and effectively recycled and widely accepted as a valuable resource.”
Brightmark’s work is focused on recapturing the value in both organic and inorganic waste streams while reducing pollution and climate change emissions in the process. Brightmark uses its proprietary molecular recycling technology, Plastics Renewal, to convert plastic feedstocks back into useful products. They have set aggressive sustainability goals and aim to offset 4.73 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2028 as well as to divert 8.4 million metric tons of plastic from landfills or the environment by 2028.
“A major facet of our sustainability work at Brightmark relies on our trade association memberships and partnerships with like-minded organizations,” shares Bob Powell, Founder and CEO of Brightmark. “We look forward to being actively engaged in HPRC activities while contributing our experience and expertise to address the challenges associated with healthcare plastics recycling.”
HPRC is currently engaged in multiple initiatives aimed at enabling recycling of healthcare plastics, including researching the applicability of different advanced recycling technologies for mixed streams of difficult-to-recycle healthcare plastics; engaging with hospitals to identify recycling challenges and best practices post-COVID; and updating our design guidance for engineers and manufacturers to improve the recyclability of healthcare products and packaging to incorporate insights and learnings from our recent work.
In Europe, HPRC is engaged in hospital barrier mapping to identify the scope/scale of current recycling programs and barriers to recycling; researching European regulations on contaminated biohazardous plastic waste in the healthcare sector to identify possible solutions; conducting a pilot to test sorting protocol for healthcare plastic packaging waste.
About HPRC
HPRC is a private technical coalition of industry peers across healthcare, recycling, and waste management industries seeking to improve the recyclability of plastic products within healthcare. HPRC is made up of brand leading and globally recognized members including Amcor, B. Braun, Baxter, BD, Boston Scientific, Brightmark, Dow, DuPont, Eastman Chemical Company, Edwards Life Sciences, Freepoint Ecosystems, Gore Medical, Iron Mountain, Johnson & Johnson, LMA Medical Materials, Medtronic, Nelipak Healthcare Packaging, Nexus Circular, Paxxus, Plastic Ingenuity, PureCycle, Ravago Recycling Group, Sartorius, Sonoco Healthcare, Sterimed, Stryker, Technimark, ThermoFisher Scientific, and Wiicare. Committed to continuous dialogue, HPRC explores ways to enhance the economics, efficiency, and ultimately the quality and quantity of healthcare plastics collected for recycling. HPRC is active across the United States and Europe working on projects to remove barriers and enable healthcare plastics recycling. HPRC works with key stakeholders across the value chain, identifying opportunities for collaboration, and participating in industry events and forums. For more information, visit www.hprc.org and follow HPRC on LinkedIn.
About Brightmark
Brightmark is a global waste solutions company with a mission to reimagine waste. The company takes a holistic, closed-loop, circular economy approach to tackle the planet’s most pressing environmental challenges with imagination and optimism for the future. Through the deployment of disruptive, breakthrough waste-to-energy solutions focused on plastics renewal (plastic waste-to-fuel) and renewable natural gas (organic waste-to-fuel), Brightmark enables programs specifically tailored to environmental needs in order to build scalable project solutions that have a positive impact on the world and communities in which its stakeholders live and work.