That's turned out to be a lot
of stuff. "Everything comes in
packaging. It's all packaging,"
she says. The ORs actually get 2
recycle bins each: a large one
next to the regular garbage, and
another one standing by anes-
thesia's workstation. "It was
shocking what we could recy-
cle. Once we started, our staff
was always asking, 'What about
this? What about this?'"
Every OR also gets a large
collection bag for the yards and yards of blue wrap that end up there.
The material posed a challenge to the recycling efforts — "There are
not a lot of blue wrap takers," says Farrukh Bashir, Park Nicollet's
director of environmental services — but not an insurmountable one.
With the assistance of a regional recycling service, they've found a
vendor.
Help that helps
It's easy to overlook the fact that just dropping a plastic bottle or alu-
minum can into a blue bin with the chasing arrows logo on the side
does not in itself recycle it. Instructing housekeeping to carry the col-
lapsed cardboard boxes to the soiled room along with the trash, out
of sight at the end of the shift, doesn't do the job either. After the recy-
cling has been collected, it still has to go somewhere to be sorted and
sold to materials buyers.
"The other beautiful side of our recycling program is, the recycling is
collected and sorted by employees from an organization called
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 8 3
• THE BLUE BINS Recycling is always within reach in the ORs, the
med room, and from pre-op to PACU, says Betsy Crosby, RN, BSN.
Park
Nicollet
ASC
