Westlake Global Compounds and Westlake Dimex, business units of Westlake Corporation, launched “Choose Pink,” a pilot polyvinyl chloride (PVC) recycling program with Houston Methodist. The program is the first-of-its-kind at a health care system in Houston and will take place at the Outpatient Center at Houston Methodist Hospital, the hospital’s flagship location in the Texas Medical Center.
The Choose Pink pilot recycling program will establish a collection system for post-patient, PVC items such as nasal cannulas and masks; oxygen tubing; and saline bags from outpatient procedures, items traditionally disposed of in the hospital setting. These items will be collected in designated hampers and bags to contain the recycled waste, which will eliminate the need for further material sorting in this program. Bags will be collected and placed into containers and transported to a Houston Methodist warehouse to be loaded onto a semi-trailer that, once filled, will be transported to Westlake Dimex’s facility in Marietta, Ohio for recycling.
Houston Methodist will be the first health care facility to launch a PVC recycling program in the Houston area. Other programs have successfully been launched for PVC medical devices in other countries, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Belgium, Guatemala and the United Kingdom. A PVC medical device recycling program has been underway in Toronto, Canada since 2020, and other programs have recently launched in Atlanta, Chicago and Rochester, New York. According to the Vinyl Institute, 1.1 billion pounds of vinyl is recycled annually in North America, reducing the carbon footprint and preventing waste from entering landfills.
Based on the more than 100 million pounds’ capacity of plastic recycled materials Westlake Dimex processes annually, the Marietta, Ohio-based company is one of the largest processors of post-industrial resins in the U.S. The recycled material collected will be reprocessed into consumer and industrial products such as business and home office chair matting; garden edging; and household mats.