The effect of the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic on the use of personal protective equipment in hospitals

Abstract

The Covid pandemic has strongly affected the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the medical sector. Our aim was to assess the influence of Covid on PPE use within a German hospital by analyzing PPE use in four years prior to Covid and in 2020/2021. Numbers of items and mass of different types of PPE were determined based on procurement data. The results show that for the use of gloves the pandemic only had a small effect on the number of items. For body protection there was a clear trend toward a decrease in the number of items used in the years before the pandemic due to actions by the hospital toward a better environmental footprint which was partially reversed by the pandemic. The number of masks on the other hand doubled during the pandemic. Expressed in mass of PPE per patient and day, 15 g of masks, 121 g of gloves, and 183 g of body protection are used, resulting in a total of 319 g of PPE per patient and day. As medical waste has a specific treatment, no direct environmental effects of PPE use in hospitals in a region with well-developed waste treatment system are expected.

Innovations and development of sustainable personal protective equipment: a path to a greener future

“…Furthermore, it is anticipated that the supply of medical plastic would increase at a 20% annual rate between 2020 and 2025, reaching approximately 20.9 million tons of medical plastic by 2025 (Zeng et al 2024 ). According to Ivanović et al ( 2023 ), gloves are the most commonly used PPE in hospitals, followed by body protection products and masks. Although gloves drive the PPE consumption (quantity), yet they only account for about one-third of the total mass of waste while the body protection products account for maximum mass of waste because of their heavier grammage.…”