Provide a broad geographic and hospital-size economic assessment of reusable isolation gowns compared directly with disposable isolation gowns in healthcare settings and identify factors for evidence-based sustainability decision-making for hospitals and manufacturing firms. The approach uses multi-hospital data on the costs of reusables and disposables, including detailed reusable laundry costs (2021) collected from 137 hospitals, covering laundry, replacements, and transport. A comparison of reusable and disposable isolation gowns is important for the economic perspectives of healthcare organization sustainability decision-making (nurses, personnel, and stakeholders). The study used actual laundry expenditures from 134 widely distributed hospitals in competitive markets across the Eastern U.S. and Canada, along with a field assessment of the number of use cycles. The 2021 annual costs for disposable isolation gowns were also estimated. For U.S. hospital systems (6129 hospitals), selecting reusable isolation gowns yields annual savings of about $740 million, which would cover the average hospital stay of cost of about 270,000 patients per year or about 5400 patients per State in our country simply by choosing reusable gowns over disposables to prevent infections Reusable isolation gowns would account for about 10% of these savings. When comparing annual disposable and reusable costs, disposables were 200% more expensive. The economic advantages of reusable isolation gowns build on earlier environmental improvements and now provide evidence-based data for decision-makers, nurses, hospital stakeholders, healthcare organizations, and service providers of these products. Past research indicates major benefits across eight environmental metrics and shows that the long-term risk of healthcare-associated infections from reusables over 50 years remains negligible.

Using bicomponent (PET: nylon) split microfiber woven products as reusable flat mops and wipers has significantly outperformed equivalent disposable options in achieving hygienically clean surfaces, which is the major goal of health care facilities. From anecdotal observations at hospitals and long-term care facilities, disposables are used about 2.5-fold more frequently per patient. This leads to a 91% annual cost savings for flat mops and wipers, which is thus about 10% of the yearly cost of the same disposables. Even at a 1 to 1 use ratio, selecting disposable mops is over 420% more expensive and 240% for wipers. At the national level, if all U.S. hospitals utilize bicomponent split microfiber reusables versus single-use flat mops, the U.S. hospital sector would save about $1.61 billion. For wipers, the savings would be about $0.72 billion. Thus, for just this basic healthcare product change to reusables from disposables for hospital environmental services departments (EV), the U.S. hospital sector would save about $2.3 billion annually, a significant national healthcare cost savings. With this lower annual cost and a greater reduction in environmental impacts, the contribution of reusable bicomponent split microfiber cleaning devices to healthcare organizations' economic and environmental sustainability is now well documented.

Reusable surgical gowns are important in hospitals and when compared to disposable surgical gowns offer significant economic benefits. This study was initiated to quantify the annual cost saving to hospitals by selecting the reusable surgical gown option by using data from 127 separate hospitals over the period of January to December, 2021. These laundries are all separate organizations with their own collection and processing methods, ownership, scale, and varying ages of equipment. All are in competitive markets and so it is assumed to be representative of the larger domain of U.S and Canadian laundries serving hospitals. Annual cost savings were calculated as the difference in annual disposable and reusable costs divided by the annual disposable cost (as a percent). For a representative hospital system there is nearly a 50% annual cost savings which accrues to the health care organization’s bottom line. Said differently, selecting disposable surgical gowns increases the hospitals surgical gown budget by about 190%. For the entire U.S. health care system (6,129 hospitals), a shift to 90% reusable surgical gowns would yield a health care savings of about $354 million per year, a beneficial step

Background: Bicomponent split microfiber reusable wipers and flat mops are innovative textiles used to hygienically clean healthcare surfaces and, hence, reduce hospital-acquired infections. Sustainability improvements are reflected as reduced energy and mass requirements over a life cycle. Methods: The environmental impacts of reusables were compared to disposable equivalents using standard life cycle assessment procedures. Results: With information from 80 hospitals, disposable flat mops and wipers were used at a higher rate than reusable counterparts; the disposable/reusable ratio was 2.3:1 for wipers and 2.5:1 for flat mop pads. Bicomponent split microfiber reusable products had lower impacts (65–95%) in all categories considered: global warming potential, natural resource energy, blue water use, and solid waste production. Discussion: Results reinforce other studies that compare reusable and disposable textile options in healthcare. Laundry energy is an important driver of energy use for reusables. The energy associated with water consumption for disposables’ supply chains is significantly greater than net water consumption for reusables laundry. Conclusions: Selecting disposables versus bicomponent split microfiber reusable flat mops and wipers increases these specific environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) impacts by 320% to 2000%, which is clearly not an environmental sustainability improvement. Group Purchasing Organizations may be barriers to hospital adoption of these reusables.

Urgent sustainability efforts are needed, particularly in resource-intensive industries such as the pharmaceutical sector. Pharmaceuticals (“drugs”) are made up of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and excipients. Excipients are essential components in drug formulations. They play a significant role for the applicability of drugs. In recent years the environmental impact of APIs received much attention. In contrast, the environmental impacts of excipients most often are not considered. Here, we systematically evaluate the environmental impacts of 38 pharmaceutical excipients through cradle-to-gate life cycle assessments (LCAs) and environmental biodegradability analysis. This integrated approach provides environmental scores for excipients. Our findings identify critical environmental hotspots, particularly in excipient application fields such as binders. This calls for greener, more sustainable alternative excipients. As a key outcome, the “Excipient Selection Guide” is introduced based on a database which provides data for relative ranking to environmental issues. It will enable the pharmaceutical industry to determine whether new or existing alternatives truly represent a more sustainable choice. The data and the method can be used to design novel, greener, and more sustainable excipients of the future (“Benign by Design”). While focused on the application for pharmaceuticals, the guide's principles and data are applicable to other sectors, including food, chemistry, cosmetics, and personal care, supporting sustainability across industries where the same compounds are used.

Background:Objectives of quality principles in the clinical setting present nursing with opportunities for quality patient care but at lower environmental footprint. This affects patients, hospital personnel, and community because choices reduce climate change and thus support an innovative nursing role. Purpose:This article aims to support nursing knowledge to include environment in decisions regarding patient care and reusable versus disposable incontinence underpads (IUPs). Methods:A life cycle analysis was conducted, including soiling, reusable cycles before removal, supply chains, laundry use, and end-of-life environmental impact. Results:The selection of reusable IUPs versus disposables reduced total natural resource energy consumption by 71%, greenhouse gas emissions by 61%, blue water consumption by 57%, and solid waste by 97%. Conclusions:The nursing community can use this information in its health care organizations regarding IUP to advocate for decisions to select reusable IUPs that benefit our environment (air, water, and land).

L-tryptophan is a naturally occurring α-amino acid that is also purchased by consumers for medicinal and dietary purposes. L-tryptophan is also a starting point for synthesizing medical derivatives with antiplatelet aggregation and antibacterial activity. Beneficial direct use and subsequent synthetic product use were evaluated with respect to the environmental footprint of the cradle-to-L-tryptophan manufacturing process, using the next generation life cycle inventory technology of the Environmental Genome. The principal route is fermentation from sugar (dextrose). The environmental metrics quantified were natural resource energy combustion (NREc) and CO2eq for air (defined below). The environmental boundary includes 137 chemical intermediates (gate-to-gates, gtg), of which 33 are non-repeating, with the most consequential for the environmental metrics being dextrose and the L-tryptophan. The cradle-to-gate process energy is 147 MJ/kg L-tryptophan, while the more comprehensive natural resource energy combustion (NREc) is 222 MJ/kg L-tryptophan. The carbon footprint is 18.7 kg CO2equivalent/kg L-tryptophan, with 53% of this from the cradle-to-gate of the supply chains. It is important to note this is only a partial environmental assessment of L-tryptophan since the environmental benefits of use in consumption and when used to make preventative pharmaceuticals are not included.

In cleanroom facilities, both disposable and reusable textile garments (coveralls, boots, hoods, and frocks) meet the particulate standards from the most rigorous to the most basic levels. However, the reusables clearly offer two other important benefits, lower annual cost and lower environmental impact. The objectives of this article are to now provide quantitative reusable product benefits on a U.S. national environmental and economic basis. This is the first quantitative, novel multi-user economic evaluation of selecting cleanroom reusables over disposables. For personal protection equipment (PPE), these cost and environmental benefits indicate there is also an improved environmental and economic aspect to the increased national demand for reusables related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), while necessary cleaning with approved detergents is easily achieved. The current reusable cleanroom market (14.1 million packages) was estimated to be 60% nonsterile and 40% sterilized. The total market is about 50% reusable and 50% disposable. This research documents that there is an annual cost reduction of about 58% when selecting reusables over disposables, giving an economic savings to the U.S. cleanroom sector from reusables of about $1.2 billion in the next decade. This is also saving the total U.S. about 136 million MJ natural resource energy/year (38 million kWh) and about 8.4 million kg CO2eq annually (removal of about 1,650 cars/year). A maximum hypothetical case for reusables at 87.5% of the market (12.5% are mandatory Hazmat disposable) would yield a U.S. national savings of nearly $2.1 billion/decade to the cleanroom sector bottom line, as well as 2.4 billion MJ nre savings in energy or removal of about 29,000 cars/decade. These results indicate there are effective, verifiable, and easily obtained environmental and economic benefits by the basic transition by diverse cleanrooms in deciding to select reusable garments.

AbstractThis research is to produce the first quantitative evaluation, using global warming potential (GWP, kg CO2 eq), of all published cradle‐to‐gate life cycle studies that compare reusable vs single‐use products. We seek to determine whether there are consistent and fundamental factors that differentiate disposable and reusable products. A comparative assessment was made of the cradle‐to‐gate life cycle analyses of all published comparisons of reusable and single‐use products from 1990 to 2016. A literature search found only 20 products in which a full life cycle analysis of cradle‐to‐gate (supply chain, manufacturing, reprocessing, and packaging of the reusable item) and supply chain plus manufacturing for the disposable had been published. GWP or carbon footprint was used as the environment comparison metric to which we added energy for the product manufacturing metrics. In this diverse set of products, the reusable product was consistently lower in cradle‐to‐gate energy use and global warming potential than the comparable single‐use product. However, no apparent product characteristic appeared to govern the extent by which the reusable had a lower carbon footprint. These compelling results were compared with two other references in which disposable products were reported as better. However, when the data were reviewed with those authors, they reevaluated and found errors in calculations and corrected the results to then identify the lower reusable GWP impact compared to the respective disposable. The diversity of products studied and the consistently lower GWP impact of reusable products herein may suggest that products with reusable/disposable options could be predicted to show that the reusable is better than the single‐use option.

We developed a Life Cycle based Alternatives Assessment (LCAA) framework for efficiently including quantitative exposure and life cycle impacts in chemical substitution studies.

Surgical gowns help protect patients from exposure to microorganisms and serve as personal protective equipment for perioperative staff members. Medical textiles, including surgical gowns, are available as reusable and disposable products. Health care facility administrators and leaders who endeavor to use environmentally sustainable practices require current data for decision making. This study analyzed all activities from the extraction of fossil materials from the earth to the end-of-life disposal of reusable and disposable surgical gowns. The researchers included calculations for laundry and wastewater treatment operations and compared the environmental effects of the two surgical gown systems. The study results showed that selection of reusable gowns rather than disposable gowns reduced natural resource energy consumption (64%), greenhouse gas emissions (66%), blue water consumption (83%), and solid waste generation (84%). Perioperative nurses can use this information to assist facility leaders as they make informed decisions related to gown system selection.

Carpet manufacturing continues to adopt advanced technologies and new processes. One important process is central to the carpet product, dyeing for the color and beauty of patterns derived for modern carpets. Carpets and fibers are dyed by a variety of different processes at different stages of production, from the fiber, the yarn, or the carpet, depending on the product use, economy of the process, and market demand for the color. Dyeing technology for carpets has evolved to advanced processes and is discussed in this paper. Fiber can be dyed as it is extruded, as in the case of solution dyeing; yarn can be dyed as in skein, or space dyeing; or whole carpet pieces can be dyed as in beck or continuous dyeing. This paper is the first direct comparison of these five carpet dyeing processes with the goal to understand the technology changes to more advanced manufacturing. Using a life cycle approach, gate‐to‐gate (within the factory) inventories are created to assess resource and energy consumption associated with each of the processes. The life cycle inventories are created based on process flow models of product manufacturing to provide transparency. A single color agent (beta‐copper phthalocyanine) and a single face fiber (nylon 6) are used for the comparison. The older batch processes, such as beck and skein, consume the most water and energy, while the most recent advanced process of solution dyeing uses the least amount of energy and water.

AbstractThis article is to demonstrate a consistent, transparent approach to comparing plastic recycling technologies. The uniform comparison is based on each recycling technology having the same input (waste PET), mass basis for processing, output as new product (new PET product or fuels), and the concept of the same multiple (two) closed loops of recycling. We seek to demonstrate, at the fundamental technology level, how energy use differentiates plastic recycling technologies. Five polymer‐recycling processes are examined using a uniform, quantitative comparison of 1 kg PET bottles (about 100 single‐serve 0.5 L water bottles): direct reuse, 100% mechanical recycled content, depolymerization, and re‐polymerization of new resin and 100% to bottles, reclaiming energy value, and landfill. The life cycle energy benefit for recycle technologies with varying product recycled content can be determined by a single equation. All these recycling processes resulted in total energy reduction per kg PET bottles compared to landfilling. The base case of three cycles per 1 kg PET bottles is used to explore the influence of recycling loops. Direct reuse gave a 290% energy improvement with three cycles. Other processes, all at 100% recycle content, gave improvements: mechanical (250%), depolymerization/repolymerization (150%), and energy recovery (120%). More information would improve the analysis of the depolymerization process assessment. These preliminary data describe the analyses that are needed to quantify the benefit of recycling any polymer using these recycling methods. The Environmental Genome (“EGI”) provides valuable information for these calculations as it contains the polymers and supply chains for such evaluations.

BACKGROUND:Isolation gowns serve a critical role in infection control by protecting healthcare workers, visitors, and patients from the transfer of microorganisms and body fluids. The decision of whether to use a reusable or disposable garment system is a selection process based on factors including sustainability, barrier effectiveness, cost, and comfort. Environmental sustainability is increasingly being used in the decision-making process. Life cycle assessment is the most comprehensive and widely used tool used to evaluate environmental performance. METHODS:The environmental impacts of market-representative reusable and disposable isolation gown systems were compared using standard life cycle assessment procedures. The basis of comparison was 1,000 isolation gown uses in a healthcare setting. The scope included the manufacture, use, and end-of-life stages of the gown systems. RESULTS:At the healthcare facility, compared to the disposable gown system, the reusable gown system showed a 28% reduction in energy consumption, a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a 41% reduction in blue water consumption, and a 93% reduction in solid waste generation. CONCLUSIONS:Selecting reusable garment systems may result in significant environmental benefits compared to selecting disposable garment systems. By selecting reusable isolation gowns, healthcare facilities can add these quantitative benefits directly to their sustainability scorecards.

Interest in environmental benefits and impacts of products continues to evolve. Direct macro-creation of pieces, parts, and components assembled into products is an essential final step, requiring energy and chemical profiles. The UPLCI effort is a multi-university effort to create reusable, quantitative descriptions of the energy/mass efficiencies of each unit process step (e.g. drilling, joining, surface coating, etc.) that work together to take materials as inputs and achieve the final manufacturing step to products (industry, consumer, and military).

Cleanroom garments serve a critical role in such industries as pharmaceuticals, life sciences, and semiconductor manufacturing. These textiles are available in reusable and disposable alternatives. In this report, the environmental sustainability of cleanroom coveralls is examined using life cycle assessment technology. The complete supply chain, manufacture, use, and end-of-life phases for reusable and disposable cleanroom coveralls are compared on a cradle-to-end-of-life cycle basis. Three industry representative coveralls are examined: a reusable woven polyethylene terephthalate (PET) coverall, a disposable flash spunbonded high-density polyethylene (HDPE) coverall, and a disposable spunbond-meltblown-spunbond polypropylene (SMS PP) coverall. The reusable cleanroom coverall system shows substantial improvements over both disposable cleanroom coverall systems in all environmental impact categories. The improvements over the disposable HDPE coverall were 34% lower process energy (PE), 23% lower natural resource energy (NRE), 27% lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and 73% lower blue water consumption. The improvements over the disposable SMS PP coverall were 59% lower PE, 56% lower NRE, 57% lower GHG emissions, and 77% lower blue water consumption. In addition, the reusable system shows a 94-96% reduction in solid waste to the landfill from the cleanroom facility. Between the two disposable cleanroom coveralls, the flash spunbonded HDPE coverall shows a measurable environmental improvement over the SMS PP coverall.LAY ABSTRACT: Pharmaceutical drugs are manufactured and handled in controlled environments called cleanrooms to ensure the safety and quality of products. In order to maintain strict levels of cleanliness, cleanroom personnel are required to wear garments such as coveralls, hoods, and gloves that restrict the transfer of particles from the person to the environment. These garments are available in reusable and disposable types. Cleanroom operators consider a number of factors when selecting between reusable and disposable garments, including price, comfort, and environmental sustainability.In this report, the environmental sustainability of reusable and disposable cleanroom coveralls is examined using a technique called life cycle assessment. With this technique, environmental parameters such as energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are quantified and compared for three market representative cleanroom coveralls, from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use, and final disposal. Reusable coveralls were found to substantially outperform disposable coveralls in all environmental parameters examined. This is an important conclusion that supports cleanroom companies that select reusable coveralls to be more sustainable.

Thermoset composites represent a substantial challenge for recycling, even as composite products increase in market interest. The concept of putting all future thermoset composite products into landfills over the next decades is unlikely to continue. This paper examines the three eras in the history of thermoset product recycling, the drivers for increased recycling, and possible future trends. Technology for managing thermoset composite products at end-of-life first focused on retrieving fiber and to a lesser extent resin. Then in a second era, research focused on better utilization of recovered fiber and finally the third era is now keeping more of the original resin–fiber structure to reuse these composites. Drivers are emerging to stimulate thermoset recycling, including States with success in recycling other challenging products (tires, carpets, automobile parts, etc.) setting policy and fees to encourage recycling. The evolution of heat recovery as a thermoset recycling option in Europe is another driver. Additionally, efforts at certification of recycled fiber quality may stimulate greater reuse.

LanzaTech has developed novel microbial bioreactor systems capable of direct gas fermentation to produce ethanol from carbon-containing gases. In this study, a life-cycle assessment method is used to quantify the global warming potential of several scenarios for producing renewable ethanol with the LanzaTech process. Scenarios considering ethanol produced from steel mill waste gases or biomass (corn stover, forest residue, or switchgrass, via gasification) have been considered, using input data from peer-reviewed literature, government reports; life cycle inventory databases, and LanzaTech process engineering estimates. Using standardized life-cycle assessment methods, ethanol produced via LanzaTech fermentation appears to result in greenhouse gas emissions that are at least 60% lower than that of conventional fossil gasoline, with biomass based ethanol achieving close to 90% emission reductions. Results indicate that the LanzaTech gas fermentation technology can be a viable alternative for producing next-generation biofuels that satisfy United States Renewable Fuels Standard policies concerning fuels with a reduced greenhouse gas emissions footprint.

Life cycle assessment is the predominant method to compare energy and environmental impacts of agricultural production systems. In this life cycle study, we focused on the comparison of swine manure to synthetic fertilizer as nutrients for corn production in Iowa. Deep pit (DP) and anaerobic lagoon (AL) treatment systems were compared separately, and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) was chosen as the representative synthetic fertilizer. The two functional units used were fertilization of 1000 kg of corn in a continuous corn system and fertilization of a crop yielding 1000 kg of corn and a crop yielding 298 kg of soybean in a 2-yr corn-soybean rotation. Iowa-specific versions of emission factors and energy use were used when available and compared with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change values. Manure was lower than synthetic fertilizer for abiotic depletion and about equal with respect to eutrophication. Synthetic fertilizer was lower than manure for global warming potential (GWP) and acidification. The choice of allocation method and life cycle boundary were important in understanding the context of these results. In the DP system, methane (CH) from housing was the largest contributor to the GWP, accounting for 60% of the total impact. When storage systems were compared, the DP system had 50% less GWP than the AL system. This comparison was due to reduction in CH emissions from the storage system and conservation of nitrogen. Nitrous oxide emissions were the biggest contributor to the GWP of UAN fertilization and the second biggest contributor to the GWP of manure. Monte Carlo and scenario analyses were used to test the robustness of the results and sensitivity to methodology and important impact factors. The available crop-land and associated plant nutrient needs in Iowa was compared with manure production for the current hog population. On a state- or county-wide level, there was generally an excess of available land. On a farm level, there is often an excess of manure, which necessitates long-distance transport.