Medinas was founded in 2017 with a single goal – to lower healthcare costs by helping hospitals reduce wasteful spending, and by doing so, facing a nearly trillion-dollar challenge head-on. Medinas is a data-driven marketplace that helps hospitals and healthcare organizations find beneficial reuse opportunities for capital equipment (everything from defibrillators to MRI machines) that often otherwise ends up in landfills. By helping to monetize these items and providing a seamless buying and selling experience, Medinas is able to provide rural hospitals and medical facilities around the world affordable access to critical life-saving equipment.
With over 6,200 hospitals in the United States alone, along with over 20,000 combined ambulatory surgical clinics and imaging centers, the market is massive. And just by working with hospitals alone, Medinas will help divert 17,000 tons of e-waste from landfills annually, moving them instead into beneficial reuse programs, while also being responsible for significant greenhouse gas reduction.
Based on the results of an environmental impact study in Arizona conducted by Medinas at 6 hospitals over a twelve-month period, partnering with Medinas provided significant upstream and downstream environmental benefits. Downstream, Medinas prevented toxic and radioactive e-waste from older equipment from entering landfills, while upstream Medinas helped prevent the unnecessary manufacture of new hospital equipment by ensuring the beneficial reuse of equipment. According to Medinas, “the net benefits to natural resource preservation, greenhouse consumption, and reduction in human health impacts are significant.”
In the pilot, Medinas instituted a program to beneficially reuse hospital equipment that would otherwise end up in landfills. The downstream results were staggering. Over the course of one year:
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- Over 33,000 lbs of equipment was diverted from landfills;
- Over 96% of the waste diverted was e-waste containing PCBs (Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls), as well as heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium;
- One quarter of all diverted wasted contained radioactive materials, including Cobalt 60, which has a half-life of over 5 years
Because the equipment Medinas helped divert from landfills was all beneficially reused in clinical applications, each pound of waste diverted represented a pound of new electronic equipment that did not need to be manufactured. As a result, the reduction in manufacturing requirements led to the following environmental savings for the Arizona pilot partners:
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- An over 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as compared to purchasing new equipment, which is especially notable because a full 59% of hospital greenhouse gas emissions come from equipment procurement;
- A 50% reduction in human health impacts from manufacturing processes using radioactive materials and toxic metals; and
- A 42-50% reduction in metal, semimetal, and rare earth element usage as compared to purchasing new equipment.
Medinas joined Green Business Bureau not only to pursue green business certification and leverage the GBB EcoAssessment™ and EcoPlanner™ tools as part of their framework for prioritizing and implementing sustainability initiatives, they’ve also partnered with GBB to provide access to green certification for their customers. By demonstrating their own commitment to greening and sustainability, they are focused on continuously spreading the message about the environmental impacts of e-waste and healthcare-related pollutants, while driving unnecessary costs out of healthcare.
For more information, please visit www.medinas.com
