Reciclagem de plástico pós-consumo em contexto com a economia circular de um hospital veterinário.

Abstract

As the population and industrial activities increase, the demand for natural resources increases, resulting in greater waste generation and, consequently, resource depletion. The cycle of extraction, production, consumption, and disposal is unsustainable, making it necessary to adopt sustainable practices that lead to more efficient waste management. The implementation of cleaner technologies that reduce, reuse, repair, and/or recycle waste offer low-impact environmental solutions and enable the implementation of a circular economy within waste management. In this sense, this research seeks to use additive manufacturing as a sustainable technology for the recycling of saline solution bag packaging, in order to evaluate the impacts associated with the circular economy of a veterinary hospital, in which fused filaments were produced from HDPE waste and triadically printed to produce new parts. The results indicate that new cycles with different functionalities can be attributed to the material, and the maximum number of five cycles indicated for recycling HDPE is capable of providing environmental gains for fossil depletion, by avoiding the extraction, transportation and disposal of larger volumes of plastic. It also reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 58%, when compared to the conventional mode of consumption and disposal, and directly and positively impacts the use of this technology for local recycling of plastics and the sustainable management of any organization.