Baxter to Scale Up PVC Intravenous Bag Recycling Program

Baxter International announced the completion of the first phase of its intravenous (IV) bag recycling pilot program. Launched in conjunction with Northwestern Medicine, more than six tons of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) IV bag waste was successfully diverted from landfill to be recycled.

“Across the country, hundreds of thousands of IV bags are used every day. Baxter is a proud manufacturer and supplier of these bags, which are ubiquitous in hospital care — particularly single-use plastic containers that provide patients clinically essential solutions, including fluids, nutrition and medicines,” says Cecilia Soriano, president of Baxter’s Infusion Therapies and Technologies division.

Standard practice for non-hazardous IV bag removal includes draining of residual fluid and disposing as waste which ultimately ends up in a landfill. Through this pilot program, stakeholders from several Northwestern Memorial Hospital departments were engaged to help develop a new process that enables the incorporation of material separation for recycling into nursing workflow, while also managing space constraints common in hospital settings. With dedicated third-party logistics and recycling partners, collected IV bags are transported and inspected to ultimately be recycled into products such as industrial floor mats and protective edging for docks and landscaping. All IV bags involved in this pilot were made of PVC.

“We are proud to pilot this program with Baxter to be the first health system in the nation to begin recycling PVC IV bags,” says Jeff Good, Northwestern Medicine’s first chief sustainability executive and vice president of operations. “What started as a single-unit pilot is now standard practice across several of our inpatient units within Northwestern Memorial Hospital and has resulted in the recycling of more than 170,000 IV bags.”

Baxter’s objective for the pilot’s first phase was to establish proof of concept for a program that assists hospitals in recycling plastic IV bags manufactured by Baxter. Following the successful conclusion of the pilot phase, Northwestern Medicine will continue to implement the program and will explore expanding the program throughout the health system. Baxter is actively seeking to engage additional health system participants in the Chicago area to further validate the process and economic feasibility. Doing so will support long-term, large-scale implementation with potential rollout to other health systems across the country.