DCHAS-L Archives, Aug 23, 2022 - Re: [DCHAS-L] Recycling disposable gloves..

We were looking into this [recycling nitrile gloves] to reduce waste and achieve sustainability goals, Kimberly Clark was one of three vendors we found offering this service, with KC – you had to use their products and use them to participate in their program.

Not sure how they would know if it was actually their gloves in the returned material, or if they even cared, as long as you made purchases. You have to wonder if they are doing the same thing with the materials returned for recycling as many municipalities across the country are doing today, just sending it to a landfill. Separating and transporting material separately, just to end up in the same disposition is not sustainable.

I never received any further details about the KC program/process, return shipping, etc. because there was no way we could get individual labs to purchase only KC glove stock.

In hindsight, it seems like just a way for them to increase sales and not a bona fide program to make quality nitrile pellets.

Good luck getting them to reveal their decontamination process, I believe nothing I hear and only half of what I see. The big question is – where is that recycled material? How is it used again? What has it come back as?

Recycling in general is severely struggling and very unprofitable due to contamination, aspirational recycling, and lack of generator participation.

Reducing and reusing need more attention because recycling is not working.

Just my $0.02,

Best,

James

From: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU> On Behalf Of Debbie Decker
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2022 6:02 PM
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] Recycling disposable gloves..

We rinse our soda cans and recyclables to keep the ants and other critters from overtaking the bin.

Kimberly/Clark.would recycle nitrile gloves but you had to ship the gloves back to them. When we paid to ship pallet loads of gloves, and funds from the sustainability office dried up, it was an expense we couldn't justify. K/C didn't express a concern about nominally contaminated gloves.

Debbie

On Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 4:22 PM <pzavon**At_Symbol_Here**rochester.rr.com> wrote:

I find it hard to imagine what kind of recycling process can be run without knowing what, or how much, contamination is on the gloves, especially in a world where we have to rinse and dry our soda bottles before they can go into the residential recycle stream. Perhaps requesting a description of their handling process would be in order.

Peter Zavon, CIH
Penfield, NY

PZAVON**At_Symbol_Here**Rochester.rr.com

From: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU> On Behalf Of Margaret Rakas
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2022 4:30 PM
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU
Subject: [DCHAS-L] Recycling disposable gloves..

Good afternoon,

We have several labs that want to participate in glove recycling. These are nitrile gloves that the supplier intends to be used for work with chemicals (glove permeation data available) with (at most) minor amounts of chemicals on them ('splash' amounts rather than immersion)--most likely have nothing on them. The recycling companies say they don't care what's on them, it's all good--one even says acid, biologicals, it's all fine.

I can make an argument against recycling gloves used in recombinant DNA or BSL-2 work, but with the 'we'll gloves with anything on them' I am having trouble finding a reason to say 'NO!' to ardent recycling supporters who use chemicals, particularly small amounts of flammable and dilute corrosive chemicals.

I'd like to know if other institutions are sending gloves to recycling vendors--do you approve this lab by lab, are my concerns about contamination issues unwarranted, etc?

Many thanks,

Margaret

--

Margaret A. Rakas, Ph.D.
Lab Safety & Compliance Director
Clark Science Center
413-585-3877 (p)

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