SydPath Pathology commences needle cap recycling program

27 Jul 2023

St Vincent’s Pathology service, SydPath has commenced an innovative recycling project, with an aim to save over 140,000 pieces of plastic from landfill.

In a first for the NSW pathology sector, every plastic needle cap from each blood samples taken across St Vincent’s Public and Private Hospitals, The Kinghorn Cancer Centre and all 26 SydPath collection centres across the state, will be collected and recycled, in an effort to reduce our Organisation’s environmental footprint.

Rodrigo Fritis-Lamora, St Vincent’s Clinical Sustainability lead reached out to needle manufacturer Becton Dickinson (BD) to highlight the issue of hundreds of thousands of clean needle caps ending up in landfill across the health care sector. BD have been a partner with St Vincent’s for the last 25 years and agreed to fund the implementation of this project to get it off the ground, leading the field within medical device manufacturing in regards to whole of life stewardship of their medical products.

St Vincent’s have also partnered with Allmould Plastics Group from Orange NSW who will be reprocessing the recycled Becton Dickinson materials, giving this product once headed to landfill or incineration, a second life.

Scott Cantrill, Allmould Representative says that “Allmould Plastics are conscious about the environment and indeed our oncoming generation livelihoods and living conditions. Our company seeks to disrupt the mentality of ‘it can’t be recycled’ and look for ways to turn plastic products into a circular loop, giving materials a second life that extends well off into the future”.

He said “working with likeminded people and entities like St Vincent’s, SydPath and BD shows how collaboration and commitment can go a long way in making a big difference in how we live and work sustainably”.

Roderigo added, “The staff engagement across Sydpath has been extremely positive from the phlebotomists to the couriers they all feel like they're doing their part for Sustainability. I hope that this simple initiative can be adopted by all pathology services across the country and can be scaled up to save tonnes of needle caps each year from landfill. It would be amazing to see this become normal practice in years to come within the pathology sector."

For more information watch this video.