From garbage to green in the operating room: an anesthesiology resident-led soft plastics recycling quality improvement project

Anesthesia contributes up to 25% of operating room (OR) waste. We sought to conduct a quality improvement project to initiate soft plastic recycling, aiming to recycle 1,000 g per day of soft plastic.

In this single-centre, anesthesiology resident-led quality improvement initiative in British Columbia, Canada, we started a soft plastics recycling collection program in a single operating room (OR) and expanded it to 12 ORs through a series of Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles. The outcome measure was the daily weight of soft plastics recycled. We tracked the number of mistakes as a balancing measure. We collected data eight months after the conclusion of the project to assess sustained changes. We visualized data with Shewhart control charts.

One OR resulted in a mean (standard deviation [SD]) of 194 (157) g of soft plastics collected daily. Once we expanded to all ORs, a mean (SD) of 1,524 (708) g of waste was collected daily. A mean (SD) of 1,284 (613) g was recycled daily during the eight-month follow-up. There was a median [interquartile range (IQR)] of 0 [0–2] mistakes per day with only one OR, which increased to a median [IQR] of 2 [1–4] mistakes per day upon expansion, and remained low at eight months, with a median [IQR] of 1 [0–3] mistake per day. E-mail reminders and signage improved the error rate.

We successfully introduced and sustained a soft plastics collection program in our centre’s OR suite with the aim to stream it for recycling. Monitoring and education were helpful in growing the program and reducing errors.