By Travis E. Poling

Every day in Texas, thousands of red plastic biomedical waste bins for used needles are destroyed and sent to the landfill. What’s inside has no place returning to the hospital or clinic, but MedSharps founder Bill Jewett saw a way to keep the pricey receptacles out of the waste stream.

MedSharps, with its main medical waste processing facility in Schertz, began offering reusable sharps containers that can keep up to 13 tons of waste out of the landfill for a single 250-bed hospital. The little red containers have the sharp contents safely removed and processed. The containers then are sterilized and sent back to the medical site for reuse.

MedSharps and sister company Marshall Shredding offer full-service document shredding and medical waste disposal throughout the state with clients such as the Veterans Affairs health care system, Lackland Air Force Base, the Texas Department of Health and the Texas A&M Health Science Center.

CEO Bill Jewett, who launched MedSharps in 2009 after careers in the U.S. Navy and as a representative for a medical device company, says the company has grown from 15 to 33 employees in the last year.

Jewett’s next project draws on his experience as a medical device rep, when he spent countless hours in operating rooms opening expensive one-time use devices for a procedure.

“Sometimes instruments that cost thousands of dollars are thrown out even when they’ve been opened and not used,” Jewett says. “I just wondered where all that waste went.”

By next year he expects to introduce a way to safely reuse certain medical devices considered single use with some of the same technology now used to treat medical waste. His hope: This system will keep even more waste out of the landfills and potentially save medical providers millions of dollars over time.

The company also is exploring new developments in technology to steam treat and sterilize medical waste in a large autoclave; Jewett expects to introduce that program sometime in 2012.

“Every day we strive to become better stewards of our environment and continue to research alternative ways to handle our medical waste stream,” Jewett says.

TRAVIS POLING  is a New Braunfels freelance writer.