Every day hospitals and other medical practitioners create tonnes of clinical waste, from sharps to surgical masks to all kinds of plastic bags and tubes.
Usually the contaminated waste gets collected and taken to a thermal destruction plant where the material is sterilised and ends up in landfill.
But to Ryan Pike, this waste is a valuable resource. The recent science and engineering graduate from Australian National University became interested in alternatives during an internship at 180 Waste Group.
"The waste is just phenomenal. It's too large to actually quantify," he said.
"A dialysis patient can produce up to eight kilograms per day, which is extraordinary. For [one dialysis company], there's 5000 tonnes of this plastic product per year."
In his third year of studies, a trip to Cambodia with Engineers Without Borders made him realise that engineering was not just a discipline but carried social responsibilities.
"We developed this pesticide solution over there for this little village right which just had 300 families living on an island. It was amazing. And that made me go okay, I need to use engineering skills for good," he said.
At 180 Waste Group based in Queanbeyan, Mr Pike quickly climbed the ranks from intern to systems engineer to chief technology officer.
The company sent him on a research trip to Italy in early 2020 to learn about machines that can turn medical waste into a safe product that can be recycled. The machines can be set up at the hospital or clinic, meaning lower emissions from transportation and less chance of bio hazards escaping into the environment.
"The moment it goes into our on-site, clinical waste machines... it gets reduced in volume, reduced in weight, but then we're taking it one step further and going okay, this is high grade medical grade plastic, how can we recover that?" he said.
If high-grade PVC can be separated out, it can be used to make plastic sheets which can be put through an extruder, moulded into products like chairs, or even used in 3D printers.
Lower-grade, composite plastics can be used in construction materials, such as road bases and concrete.
Each semester, more ANU students are brought on to research end uses for the recovered medical waste as part of their capstone subject. This semester the students created a concrete cylinder with 9 per cent plastic, which would have a lot of appeal for manufacturers wanting to cut costs while becoming more sustainable.
"We really only need 2-3 per cent to actually make a huge impact.... But it's 9% and it's still quite robust," Mr Pike said.
After selling their first machines to a public hospital, Mr Pike's mission now is to create local supply chains, connecting hospitals and clinics with local manufacturers to form a circular economy.
"Hospitals just need to realise that there is this alternative solution that will reduce the emissions, it's economically encouraging and then also there's that triple bottom line effect where we get that social boost as well," he said.
"The hospitals are starting to go, 'we have in our sphere of responsibility to actually do something about this'."
