Holly Morris, Hand Surgeon, Medical Textile Specialist

Current practice allows the use of disposable or re-usable items in the operating room or a combination of the two, and as a consequence, between 20% and 33% of health care waste is thought to originate from a hospital’s operating rooms; up to 90% of this is sent for costly and unnecessary hazardous-waste disposal. The textile components can account for up to 30% of the waste from operating theatres and regionally-collected data from trauma and orthopaedic operations suggests that 6-8kg of the waste generated per procedure originates from gowns and drapes. The negative effects on the environment are significant. By generating almost 5% of the world’s carbon emissions, healthcare, if it were a country, would be the world’s fifth biggest polluter and in the UK in 2017 the health sector alone was responsible for 4.4% of its net global greenhouse gas emissions and 6.3% of the UK’s carbon footprint. In 2020, the UK National Health Service became the first health service to announce its intention to achieve net zero emissions.
This presentation, by one of the authors of the textile guidance given for the UK Green Surgery Report explains the steps which need to be taken to achieve a circular economy for the medical textiles used in operating theatres. It is intended to alert textile researchers to the most-urgent development priorities for more environmentally-acceptable workwear for healthcare personnel; it also draws attention to the consequent need for improvements in the quality of evidence, not only on infection prevention by both single-use and re-usable items of PPE, but also on the implementation of effective laundry processes for the cleaning and microbiological decontamination of re-usable textiles.