Intro
Clinics mostly do not have a uniform color-coding system for waste separation in their bins – and different hospitals even less so. This causes confusion among the nursing staff. And what many operators don’t know: incorrect waste disposal generates excessively high costs
At the University Hospital Bonn, a pilot project is running together with the company CIRCULARMED, which supports hospitals in digitalizing and optimizing their waste management.
Michael Schmitz
Head of Infrastructure Services UKB
Founder of CIRCULARMED GmbH
"Here at UKB, we are talking about approximately 5,000 tons of waste annually. And we want to process it as sustainably and resource-efficiently as possible in the future.
Everything I don’t separate goes to energy recovery. Energy recovery may sound quite charming at first. But at the end of the day: we burn it – and energy recovery is also the most expensive option."
Offtext
Michael Schmitz is also the founder of CIRCULARMED. Together with Managing Director Meike Lutz, he launched a funding program with the Hospital Association of North Rhine-Westphalia to standardize waste management in hospitals.
Meike Lutz
Managing Director
CIRCULARMED GmbH
"Our motivation is that it doesn’t matter which city you go to, which hospital. Waste management should be uniform to relieve staff on the wards and in the operating room.
Being able to ensure that sustainability reports can be better compared, and benchmarks can be created to compare hospitals with each other.
We achieve this through digitalization of all waste management processes – and also through standardization of container management."
Offtext
Container management fails in almost every hospital – different container colors have different meanings, causing some types of waste to be disposed of together by mistake. Infectious and pathological waste is particularly often mixed up. This unnecessarily drives up disposal costs.
Therefore, the new standard uses color codes for each type of waste.
Even now, the four participating pilot hospitals show how great the potential of the planned improvements is.
Meike Lutz
"On the one hand, it’s about reducing waste costs. Ten to fifteen percent, sometimes even more, is realistically possible for the total annual costs.
At the same time, we naturally want to increase the recycling rate."
Offtext
To achieve all this, all relevant data are digitalized using CIRCULARMED’s software.
Many hospitals are initially hesitant before this step. But this is exactly where they get support:
Meike Lutz
"We support hospitals so that only a very small portion of data needs to be provided by the hospitals – the rest is automatically analyzed by AI.
For example, we can extract prices for individual disposal contracts from invoices, which makes the onboarding for individual hospitals much easier."
Offtext
With this data, hospitals can view and analyze all information – from waste volumes to invoices to collection days of recyclable bins – in one place.
UKB is now entering this phase.
Michael Schmitz
"Of course, we are starting with digitalization. So that we can really understand all waste flows in our complex environment, and get to know our recycling streams.
We can then generate reports to see which recycling measures we implement, which waste separation we introduce, and whether they lead to the right results.
Including employees helps a lot. We did this here in Bonn, and I have to say that we now have very good support from all disciplines, even getting suggestions: How can we do even better? How can we strengthen waste separation here? Sustainability is a collective task – it only works if everyone participates."
