Developing a Circular Economy for Medical Testing Plastics

随着政府和消费者对减少塑料废物的兴趣日益浓厚，医疗保健行业估计全球使用了1500万吨塑料，这带来了一些独特的挑战。虽然在英国，NHS已经计划减少不必要的塑料废物，作为“实现净零NHS”的一部分，但要实现这一目标，需要新的实践和技术。在医疗保健部门使用的塑料中，与临床环境内外医学测试中使用的塑料相关的废物代表了大量的塑料，为循环利用提供了独特的机会。这些垃圾目前大多通过焚烧或填埋的方式处理，更糟糕的是直接进入环境，从而导致环境污染。这些塑料的循环利用将大大减少塑料废物，并为NHS等组织节省大量成本。医学测试塑料通常可以分为两种截然不同的方式。在诊所/实验室使用的，以及在个人和家庭测试中使用的护理点快速诊断试剂盒。这些不同的使用环境提出了非常不同的挑战，本提案将解决这些挑战。尽管随着COVID-19大流行的减弱，个人/家庭医疗检测减少，但由于广泛用于结核病、疟疾和艾滋病等疾病的诊断以及家庭妊娠试验和糖尿病血液检查，全球每年的POC检测超过4亿次。此外，随着我们扩大对其他疾病的低成本检测范围（特别是在低收入和中等收入国家），面临新的流行病和大流行（即禽流感或猴痘），以及改变医疗服务的提供方式，转向患者和保健从业人员之间的虚拟互动，以及家庭疾病检测日益正常化，预计POC检测的使用将会增加。同样，临床环境中产生的塑料废物，如NHS，越来越受到关注，新技术和治疗方法备受追捧。仅在英国国家医疗服务体系中，诊断测试在2022年就达到了创纪录的水平，再次有力地证明了对这些塑料进行治疗的必要性。然而，考虑到实验室的环境，与公众在临床环境之外使用的个人诊断检测试剂盒相比，这些塑料可能会促进一种不同的、也许更简单的循环途径。为此，本提案的重点是解决在临床环境（即医院、实验室等）和诊所以外的家庭和其他地方为医疗检测废物创造循环经济的挑战。这项研究不仅将创造基于开创性的、新颖的基础科学和工程的新解决方案，而且还将采用一种完整的系统方法，结合对经济、社会和环境挑战的探索，这将是为医疗测试塑料创造可持续循环经济所必须解决的问题。

Amid an ever-increasing government and consumer interest in reducing plastic waste, the estimated global use of 15 million tonnes of plastic in the healthcare sector presents some unique challenges. While in the UK, the NHS already has plans to reduce unnecessary plastic waste as part of 'Delivering a Net Zero NHS', new practices and technologies will be required to achieve that target. Among the plastics used in the healthcare sector, the waste associated with plastic used in medical testing within both clinical settings and beyond, represents a large volume of plastic that presents unique opportunities for circularisation. This waste is currently mostly disposed of by incineration or disposal into landfill or, worse, directly in the environment, thus leading to environmental pollution. Circularisation of these plastics would result in significant reduction in plastic wastes, as well as providing large cost savings to organisations, such as the NHS. Medical testing plastics can be typically characterised into two very different ways. Those used in the clinic/laboratory, and the point of care (POC) rapid diagnostic kits used in personal and home tests. These different usage environments present very different challenges, that this proposal will address. Despite the reduction of personal/home medical testing as the COVID-19 pandemic abates, POC testing exceeds 400 million tests worldwide each year on account of their widespread use for diagnosis of diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS, as well as for home pregnancy tests and diabetic blood tests. Moreover, the use of POC tests is predicted to grow as we expand the range of low-cost testing for other diseases (especially in low to middle income countries), face new epidemics and pandemics (i.e. bird flu or monkey pox) and change the delivery of medical services towards virtual interactions between patients and healthcare practitioners, accompanied by increasing normalisation of home testing for illness. Similarly, the plastic waste generated in clinical settings, such as in the NHS, presents a growing concern, with new technologies and treatments highly sought after. In NHS England alone, diagnostic testing has reached record levels in 2022, again, strongly evidencing the need for treatment of these plastics. Given the lab-based setting though, these plastics may facilitate a different, perhaps simpler, route to circularity compared to personal diagnostic testing kits which are used by the public away from the clinical settings. To this end, this proposal is focussed on addressing the challenge of creating a circular economy for medical testing waste, both in clinical settings (i.e. hospitals, labs, etc) and away from the clinic, in homes and elsewhere. The research will not only create new solutions that are based on pioneering, novel fundamental science and engineering but it will also take a whole systems approach that incorporates an exploration of the economic, social and environmental challenges that it will be essential to address in order to create a sustainable circular economy for medical testing plastics.