Blue Wrap Waste Stream Analysis; Leadership and Sustainability: A Sociotechnical Approach to Blue Wrap Waste Management in Healthcare

Hospitals face a growing challenge in managing medical waste's environmental and financial costs, which account for more than 6 million tons in the United States each year. A major contributor to this waste is blue wrap—a spunbond-meltblown-spunbond (SMS) polypropylene fabric used to maintain the sterility of surgical instruments. On average, approximately 115 million kilograms of blue wrap are discarded annually, producing about 823,000kg of CO2 emissions over a 10-year span. While initiatives exist to reduce, recycle, and remanufacture blue wrap, contamination, adhesive labels, and institutional barriers often lead to it being discarded as landfill waste. These challenges have limited hospitals’ ability to implement sustainable blue wrap waste solutions at scale. UVA Hospital is one of many institutions that struggle with this issue, generating over 12 tons of blue wrap waste annually. The central problem examined in the reports is the following: How can hospitals develop and implement effective and sustainable strategies for blue wrap waste management? The two reports focus on different facets of this challenge–one through the development of technical solutions and the other through a sociotechnical examination of the hospital leadership factors that influence waste management initiatives.