Westfall Technik, Polycarbin venture focuses on recycling for biomedical

Plastics molding and mold making group Westfall Technik Inc. is turning its attention to recycling for the biomedical industry.

The Las Vegas-based company is partnering with Polycarbin to test recycling of single-use scientific plastics that would normally be put in landfills or incinerated due to medical waste compliance regulations.

James O'Brien and Noah Pyles, cofounders of Polycarbin, who have a combined 15 years of laboratory research experience, saw an "immense amount" of single-use plastics that they and their fellow scientists consumed on a daily basis, O'Brien told Plastics News.
O'Brien and Pyles were classmates in the Physician Scientist Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, he said. They left in January after two years in the medical program to pursue Polycarbin full time.

"It was initially just our own initiative to try to make a more sustainable waste management infrastructure," O'Brien said. "It turned into this large market opportunity and almost a moral obligation to tackle this problem."

Polycarbin has a waste management software platform, which, according to its website, helps single-use medical plastics manufacturers create management systems that monitor sustainability goals. It also tracks the regulated medical waste through its product life cycle.

The resource management platform, O'Brien said, is meant "for laboratory product manufacturers to take responsibility for the plastics they produce."

The plastic produced from research institutions, biopharmaceutical and clinical laboratories, he said, "have a much larger carbon footprint than traditional plastics because of the way that it's required by law to be handled," by steam sterilization or incineration.

"We want to at least give another life to it by making the most out of its immense quantity that exists today and use it to feed a more sustainable supply chain," O'Brien said. "We want to perpetuate the life cycle of this high-quality material."

"To date, there hasn't really been a sustainable solution for the health care industry, because a lot of the materials available today aren't clean enough," Allison Lin, vice president of procurement and sustainability at Westfall Technik, told Plastics News.
Westfall Technik's medical device customers have been inquiring about the possibility of making products using a high percentage of recycled materials, Lin said.

"Originally we were waiting for chemical recycling to come on board," she said. "But Polycarbin's process gives us recycled materials with a less energy-intensive process, because they have such clean material in a closed loop environment."

"Most of the materials entering a laboratory, biopharma or hospital waste stream are clear, colorless, rigid plastics," O'Brien said. "For that reason it's a very valuable waste stream, capable of going back into the same products that it entered the waste stream as."

Westfall Technik will test the recycled material in its brand of laboratory products such as plates and tubes, Lin said, to see what percentage of recycled material will ultimately be used.

"We want to be aggressive and figure out what are the highest levels we can qualify up to," she added.

"I think COVID-19 has really brought to life the importance of plastic, especially in the health care and life science industry," O'Brien said. "Polypropylene and other polymers are being used in the testing kits for coronavirus, [personal protective equipment], the test tubes, everything that's allowing scientists and clinicians to operate at maximum efficiency during this pandemic."

Waste, he said, is the "one problem" with single-use plastic use in the fight against the virus.

"Everyone has been much more accepting of plastics, acknowledging the place it has in the health care industry," Lin said. "But there's the question of, 'What we do with all of the plastic waste?'

"The answer is to have plastic perform the role it's meant to, by protecting people, providing health care solutions and to have a circular end-of-life solution rather than it becoming plastic waste," she said.