The world is producing a record amount of single-use plastic waste, mostly made from polymers created from fossil fuels, despite global efforts to reduce plastic pollution and carbon emissions, according to a new report. While governments around the world have announced policies to reduce the volume of single-use plastic...

Ask any Sterile Processing technician about the most important first step in the decontamination process, they will always repeat this refrain “Cleaning is the most important first step, because if it’s not clean, it cannot be disinfected or sterilized.” SPD professionals have long recognized how difficult it is to clean used devices and instruments post procedure. Especially challenging are complex endoscopes, with small inner channels, valves, and ports. When left in the open-air bioburden and organic material harden...

A recent online article from CNN Health asks – “How many times can you wear pajamas, jeans, and other clothes without washing them? Experts weigh in…” Turns out that the number of times it’s appropriate to wear clothing items without washing them is based more on folklore or a person’s upbringing than professional advice. The short answer — for pajamas as well as other clothes — technically depends...

Did you know that freshwater makes up a very small fraction of all water on the Earth? Nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water, but only 2.5 percent of it is fresh, and of that just 1 percent is easily accessible. U.S. hospitals use an average of 570 gallons of water per staffed bed, per day...

Celebrate your best Thanksgiving ever!

Remember the Thanksgiving story you learned in school — how, way back when, Pilgrims and Indians got together at one giant dinner table and ate turkey and stuffing and green beans covered in Campbell's mushroom soup? And then there was peace on Earth?

Actually,  it was the Wampanoag in 1621 who helped the first wave of Puritans arriving on our shores, showing them how to plant crops, forage for wild foods and basically survive.

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Remember the scene in the Graduate when Dustin Hoffman’s future father-in-law tells him to go into PLASTICS, the growing industry at the time, one of mankind’s greatest innovations.  When we started Case Medical thirty years ago manufacturing custom trays out of metal, we were told the same thing.  PLASTIC was the best material for all things in our industry…

Sometimes we get too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole. Few recent scientific discoveries have captured the public’s imagination quite like the wood-wide web — a wispy network of fungal filaments hypothesized to shuttle nutrients and information through the soil and to help forests thrive. Scientists and nonscientists alike have posited that shared fungal networks are ubiquitous in forests around the world...

It is late October, a time when apples are pressed into cider, leaves turn to vibrant autumn colors and Halloween horror movies scare and thrill audiences. While the names of monsters, ghosts and ghouls in these movies change, there are some recurring themes that are common to all of them including dangers lurking in hidden places, unexpected twists, secret weapons and of course, sequels. In a horror movie starring SPD professionals ...

Let’s talk about rinsing, whether its dishes, your hair, salad fixings or medical devices. Doesn’t sound all that glamorous does it? Right up there with taking out the trash and many other chores that need to be done. That’s why they’re called chores after all. Truth is rinsing is really, really important, and yet is often overlooked or simply not done well enough because it takes time...