New research published in the Journal of Cleaner Production claims that biodegradable medical gowns produce hazardous greenhouse gases.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, there has been an increase in the use of disposable plasticized medical gowns, both traditional and biodegradable. According to the popular belief, the biodegradable alternative is more eco-friendly because it uses less landfill space and breaks down quickly than regular gowns. But the research claims the opposite.
"There's no magic bullet to this problem," said Fengqi You, professor in energy systems engineering at Cornell University. "Plasticized conventional medical gowns take many years to break down and the biodegradable gowns degrade much faster, but they produce gas emissions faster like added methane and carbon dioxide than regular ones in a landfill," said You, a senior faculty fellow at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, adding, "Maybe the conventional gowns is not so bad."
The creation of biodegradable gowns has an additional 11% higher incidence of ecotoxicity than traditional options, according to research performed by Cornell PhD student Xiang Zhao. The researchers discovered that onsite power co-generation combined with landfill gas capture and use techniques can cut fossil resource consumption by at least 10%, 9.79% of life-cycle landfill use, and nearly 49% of greenhouse gas emissions.
By posing 14% less toxicity to humans, 10% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and almost 10% less toxicity to freshwater when compared to biodegradable gowns in landfills with additional gas emissions, conventional gowns are more environmentally and socially sustainable. Biodegradable gowns can be more environmentally responsible than regular gowns if the gas capture efficiency is raised above 85%.
"It's nice to break down the plastic into smaller things," Zhao said. "But those small things eventually decompose into gas and if we don't capture them, they become greenhouse gases that go into the air."
The Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) funded this study with assistance from the National Science Foundation and the Division of Science, Technology, and Innovation of the New York State Empire State Development.
