David P. Tusa didn’t like seeing 3 billion medical syringes end up in landfills, groundwater streams, even playgrounds and beaches every year. He didn’t like hearing stories about the 800,000 people accidentally stuck by these needles.
As president and CEO of Sharps Compliance Inc., a Houston company that develops solutions to manage and dispose of medical waste and unused medication, Tusa knew he could change those stories.
“We need to better educate this country and recognize the issue,” Tusa says. “It’s just going to take more and more incidents where some sort of life-altering disease was contracted by someone who was sitting, say, on an airplane, reached back to grab the seatbelt and they’re stuck because (someone) placed the syringe in the seat.”
Tusa has been on a PR trail informing people about the problem as well as Sharps’ solutions. But frankly, even when people disposed syringes properly, he still wasn’t satisfied. The solution itself was inefficient, so to really solve the problem he had to innovate as well as inform.
“Home health care companies were sending trucks and drivers to people’s homes to pick up these little red containers with the syringes in them,” Tusa says. “It was not very economical to do business. We came up with a way to have the medical waste transported to our treatment facility using the mail. You don’t have to send out an additional truck and driver. You can imagine what the environmental impact is when using a mail truck that’s already out there every day.”
That makes medical waste disposal as easy as a trip to the post office — at about half the price of traditional pickup. Sharps’ innovative, sustainable solutions don’t just benefit customers; they’re actually fueled by their green initiatives in the first place.
“Virtually all of them will have their green initiatives, social responsibility, sustainability (online),” Tusa says. “When we’re calling on a large pharmaceutical manufacturer, we look to their green initiatives and say, ‘Look, you have green initiatives in place. What a great way to start, right here. You can protect your patients, you can protect the environment by making the proper disposal of syringes available to your patients.’”
In fact, because he looked to customer goals for ideas to expand his business, Tusa realized it wasn’t enough just to provide a cheaper disposal option through the mail. As customers turned greener, it forced Sharps to push sustainability even further to stay ahead as a service provider.
That led Tusa beyond disposal to think about where waste went — landfills — and how he could keep it out. The answer was Sharps’ Waste Conversion Process, where red polyethylene containers full of contaminated syringes are sealed, sterilized, shredded and pelletized. The pellets, trademarked PELLA-DRX, are used in high-energy industrial processes where the organic portion acts as fuel and the inorganic portion becomes part of the end product, such as cement.
Innovation like that is one more reason for eco-conscious customers to choose vendors on the leading edge of sustainability.
“We just try to align our goals with their goals and look how we can best change our practices to be much more green — consistent with the customer’s initiatives,” Tusa says. “You really just have to look at every step of your operating process. Look (for) ways that are more environmentally sensitive, everything from the small things of recycling cans and papers in the office to big things, like literally changing your processes as we did.”
