Our residual waste is overweight

Recycling and Reusing Diabetic Kits for a Sustainable Future

The 'Our residual waste is overweight' project encourages diabetics to hand in used kits at hospitals. There, the social economy collects the kits for recycling and subsequent reuse as raw materials.

Flanders has about 600 000 diabetics who together use more than one million glucose measurement kits to monitor their blood levels. Every month, a patient uses two kits, each consisting of sensors, applicators and readers that now end up in the household waste. The 'Our residual waste is overweight' partners are investigating how to recycle the hazardous and high-grade plastics and metals and reuse them as raw materials.

Together with the Diabetes League and manufacturers, NEKTARI asbl wants to encourage patients to hand in used kits to the hospital when they go to collect a new kit or send them in reusable envelopes made from recycled materials. Social Economy then takes care of collecting or receiving the materials and processing them together with industrial partners.

By bringing all partners together throughout the process, this project aims to raise patients' awareness of the waste problem and organise collection and processing efficiently. The materials can then be recovered as high-quality raw materials and production is better geared to reuse or resource recovery.