Tusa takes a green approach to everything at Sharps, from motion detectors on lights to the cardboard compactor behind the building to PELLA-DRX itself, because he sees small things adding up. But there’s a crucial prerequisite to meet before you can take the tiniest steps toward corporate sustainability — and it has nothing to do with the environment.
“A lot of it is just mindset,” he says. “If you can change the way that you do business and be more environmentally sensitive, then you’re all the better. You’ve got to be flexible and dynamic. If you’re not — if you’re a company that’s stuck in your ways and you’re really bureaucratic and less flexible — it’s going to be really difficult to be successful in this marketplace.”
The culture at Sharps is one where, as Tusa says, “we carry each other’s briefcases” and “make decisions in the hallway,” where he rewards good internal ideas with $100 gift cards and grants customer requests even if it incurs extra costs for Sharps. So when customers and employees alike started suggesting ideas that happened to be green, those became part of the conversation like the rest.
“My motto in the company is: I don’t want to talk about why we can’t do something; I want to talk about how we’re going to do it,” Tusa says. “We just had a phenomenal idea from a customer, and one of our regulatory people was like, ‘Well, I don’t know.’
“Well, you know what, go figure it out. And we did, we figured out a way to make it work with regulations to meet the needs of the customer. That’s the way you’ve got to be in this day and age; being bureaucratic and stodgy just doesn’t work.”
As a result, customer-focused innovation drives more than environmental responsibility at Sharps — it drives business. More than 22,000 retail pharmacies nationwide, including Walgreens, Rite Aid and Kroger, use Sharps’ medication disposal program. The company has removed more than 624 million syringes from the solid waste stream and diverted more than123,000 pounds of unused medications from landfills or public water supplies.
Still, with the bar set at 3 billion improperly disposed syringes and 200 million pounds of pharmaceutical waste, Tusa sees nothing but growth potential. He plans to tap into that by simply staying ahead of customer initiatives with innovation.
“The more business we do with our customers and as we’re more creative with our customers and come up with more ideas for our customers, it’s going to allow us to further penetrate that market,” he says. “And if we can launch some innovative programs that capture those syringes thrown in the trash and make sure they’re properly disposed of, then we all win.”
How to reach: Sharps Compliance Inc., (800) 772-5657 or www.sharpsinc.com
