University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
Intern: Lisa Sanzenbacher
IIT, Stuart School of Business, Chicago
The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is a major public research university
that includes a medical center and 15 colleges. The UIC campus is comprised
of over 100 buildings that span 250 acres. UIC has over 25,000 students and
12,000 faculty and staff.
The intern was tasked with identifying opportunities for decreasing laboratory
wastes and making recommendations for better management of regulated medical
and pharmaceutical wastes at the medical center.
Results:
The intern identified the largest waste streams on campus. These included
acetone and hexane solvents from the Organic Chemistry labs, xylene from Hospital
Pathology, and RCRA (hazardous) dual waste from the hospital. It was recommended
that the university recycle solvents and xylene. The university is evaluating
the use of on-site fractional distillation which has the potential to save
$14,000 a year.
In 2009, the university shipped over 90 tons of hazardous wastes to be incinerated.
The intern determined that a large percentage of this waste is not inherently
hazardous (e.g. plastic containers for the hospital waste) or can easily be
eliminated through source reduction, or in-house recycling. The intern developed
a reusable container program for sharps disposal that will be introduced in
early 2011. The intern estimated that a reusable container can take the place
of 600 conventional boxes and reduce the amount of plastic waste by approximately
one ton. The sharps waste will also be treated as medical waste in the future
instead of hazardous waste. The reusable sharps container program and change
in waste stream classification has the potential to save the university just
over $485,000 a year in disposal costs.
The intern also studied opportunities to reduce pharmaceutical waste through
better inventory methods and redistributing expired, unused flush medications
(e.g., saline and dextrose) to the university laboratories for use in research
projects. This project has the potential to reduce costs by another $10,000
to $15,000 a year.
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