Carmina De Young, a sustainable women’s fashion brand in London, secured a contract to make PPE gowns for Health Canada at the start of the pandemic and has expanded from 5 employees to 50. Waste due to COVID-19 has opened a new form of litter. To help curb the problem, a small business in London that used to create sustainable women’s fashion is now the first in Canada to lead a recycling project that’s diverting personal protective equipment (PPE) from landfill and turning it into new PPE.
In the summer, the federal government estimated that approximately 63,000 tonnes of COVID-19 related PPE would end up in landfill, based on projections for demand over the next year. The Lifecycle PPE project is one of 12 projects that won a grant through NGen’s Strategic Supply Challenge, which challenged companies to use advanced manufacturing technologies to build sustainable Canadian products to fight against COVID-19. Other projects in Canada turn PPE into other products, but NGen has described the Lifecycle PPE project’s recycling and manufacturing processes as “unique in the PPE space.”
Lifecycle Revive can make polypropylene pellets, like the ones seen here, out of the blue sterilization wrap (pictured in the back) that hospitals throw out. Lifecycle Revive uses a pair of machines to shred old PPE material, liquify it, and turn it into polypropylene pellets. The company will also be in charge of gathering waste from Ontario hospitals. Stahle said he’s already been conducting a pilot project to gather blue sterilization wrap from hospitals in Barrie, Orillia, Parry Sound, Smith Falls, Perth, and Ottawa.
The project wants to take PPE recycling to a whole new level by converting old PPE into a new one.
