Conference Speakers

Daniel Constant

CEO, Sustainable Solutions Incorporated

BIOGRAPHY

Over an 18-year span, Dan has been recognized as a solution provider for the Post Commercial, Industrial and Consumer recycling markets, known for producing results with challenged materials and programs.

Dan has created valuable relationships with plastic compounders, molders, fabric converters, charitable organizations and recycling companies that have a firm hold on the processing, manufacturing and distribution of plastic products globally.

Over the last 13 years, Dan has experience providing recycling services and sustainability consulting with O&M Halyard Health formally Kimberly-Clark. This service and relationship have provided Dan valuable understanding of the health care industry and more specifically, hospital operating room waste, hospital culture and collection habits.

In 2008, Dan was offered an opportunity with Kimberly Clark, now O&M Halyard Health to manage collection trials of polypropylene sterilization wrap on the west coast of the U.S., over a period of one year, Dan demonstrated that clean wrap waste could be recycled from hospitals and that there was a high demand by local recyclers to collect and process. Halyard's Blue Renew™ program was born, to date, Dan has visited and engaged more than 1000 hospitals discussing potential programs to make this material more sustainable. Dan’s leadership has supported more than 300 hospitals diverting over 5 million lbs. from the landfill annually.

With the support of O&M Halyard and participating hospitals, Dan set his efforts on creating a "Circular Economy" by creating BlueCON™ Resin, this one of a kind resin, is made from 80% hospital OR waste and is used to make environmentally preferred BlueCON™ nonwoven fabric and rigid patient care products hospitals use every day.

A major part of understanding the recycling industry is a continued knowledge of plastics and applications. Dan has conducted research and served on task groups that have re-shaped the recycling industry. These organizations include; HPRC, Halyard Health’s Blue Renew program task force, Society of Plastic Engineers, Association of Post-Consumer Plastics Recycling, Keep Texas Beautiful, Association of Grocers, Sustainable Furniture Council, Automotive Sustainability Council. 

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BlueCON Nonwoven

BlueCON Nonwoven, an environmental manufactured fabric derived from O&M Halyard’s Blue Renew program.

Our Polypropylene resin and nonwoven products are created from Hospital waste that for years has been landfilled. Through a collaboration with healthcare manufacturer our company created a sustainable recycling program to offer U.S. hospitals. This program, called Blue Renew offers education and training to hospital employees around safely collecting and recycling surgical sterilization wrap. Once collected, our company transports the material to regional recyclers to melt down the material and create our trademark BlueCON resin. The creative approach for this project was really in three phases ; 1. "Perception" No-one wants to handle hospital waste, but through our recycling relationships we gained confidence by including them and showed them first hand the passion that hospital have around recycling. 2. "Hauling/Collection" Even though we collect 5 M lbs. annually of sterilization wrap, the lbs. our spread out over 400 hospitals so hauling was a challenge. We decided that the only way this would be cost effective is to leverage relationships between current vendors at hospitals to the project and create a back haul system. We are currently partnering with medical document destruction companies, waste haulers, linen companies to name a few that have a vested interested in the success of the recycling program. 3. Finally, "Logistics" , once collected who buys the material from the haulers.. We have been blessed to work with regional recyclers, extrusion and converting companies to move the 5 M + lbs. at a frequency that matched storage capacity of our collectors.