Since the advent of disposable textiles, most of the operating rooms across the United States, and even the world, have transitioned to using these single-use textile items almost exclusively. The reusable textile service industry has not supported this change, but convenience and a lack of information prevailed in the medical industry. Now, however, the disposable textiles trend is beginning to reverse.
Waste Production and Disposal
Environmental concerns have led the call to change, with many hospitals discovering that their environmental footprint and overall waste production is bloated because of their practice of using disposable textiles in the operating room. Thanks in large part to these operating room practices, each U.S. hospital patient currently generates just under 34 pounds of waste per day. This is a horrifying number when you realize that the bulk of that is considered potentially infectious medical waste, which complicates its removal and disposal.
Using reusable textiles in the operating room drastically decreases the amount of medical waste that is generated during surgical procedures. This in turn decreases the amount of waste hospitals produce overall, simultaneously decreasing their need for specialized medical waste removal and their environmental impact.
Sustainability
It seems self-evident that disposable goods are not environmentally sustainable, whereas reusable goods are significantly more so. For a long time, sustainability was not a concern hospitals or their patients had, but in a modern hospital, it is a perpetually growing concern. Reusable textiles substantially increase a hospital's sustainability, and can actually save hospitals money.
Reusable Textiles Are Safe
The largest resistance to reusable textiles has been from doctors and patients who are unaware that these types of textiles can be as safe as, if not safer than, single-use disposable textiles. When these textiles fell from grace, there was a genuine safety difference that doctors noticed. At that time, a single-use item could be guaranteed sterile, whereas a reusable item could not always be. Nowadays, reusable gowns and drapes meet or exceed protection standards that hospitals require. Modern healthcare laundry services are able to fully disinfect and sterilize the textiles they handle, something that laundries in the 1960s were not able to guarantee.
Education regarding the safety of reusable textiles, along with information about their environmental and cost reduction benefits, is beginning to spread among medical professionals and their patients. However, there is still a lot of work that proponents of reusable textiles must do to create an informed public. Once we re-educate Americans about the efficacy and safety of reusable hospital textiles, we should see a resurgence of reusable options and the reversal of the disposables trend.