Circular Production

DenPro is a division of Denroy, one of the world’s leading innovators of high-tech, critical components for the aerospace, medical, defence and automotive industries, giving DenPro over 50 years of experience and expertise. 

With a UK state-of-the-art manufacturing facility at Denroy, the DENPRO FFP3 masks have been expertly designed and engineered to offer PPE with clinical grade protection. This reassurance, coupled with the high-tech quality gained from aerospace engineering expertise, has projected DENPRO to the forefront of the healthcare industry and beyond into infection prevention control and other sectors. But with this great success comes great responsibility and it is top of the Denroy Group agenda to find a way of turning the environmental burden of single use face masks into an efficient manufacturing resource making it sustainable, eco-friendly and through circular economy, reducing waste to a minimum.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 4 million tonnes of polypropylene PPE waste has been disposed into the environment in an uncontrolled manner causing significant and long-term ecological damage. As a manufacturer of the FFP3 masks, the DenPro team have been working tirelessly with other European countries which resulted in a pilot to recycle masks used for fit testing. The feedback from the HSCNI has been incredibly positive and the next phase to scale up the concept to recycle infectious waste is already underway.

The current process is to collect the infectious clinical waste, put it through the sterilisation process, mix it with non-hazardous waste and send it for incineration.  But Denroy have conducted trials to create a circular supply chain, which means they can take the sterilised waste mixed with other non-hazardous waste, reprocess it to become new products, therefore reusing and recycling materials for as long as possible.

DenPro is collaborating with other healthcare suppliers which will revolutionise how the healthcare service deals with waste and help them to meet their sustainability goals.