By Kathy F. Mahdoubi
This report originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of DOTmed Business News

Everything moves in reverse at Newtech Recycling's computer and electronics recycling facility in Somerset, NJ. Technicians operate in much the same way as you might see in a manufacturing video played backwards. Each piece of equipment is processed and broken down: first the casing and the circuit boards, the plastics and metal components and the wires, until there is nothing left except the individual components used to manufacture them.


Jim Entwistle is President of Newtech Recycling, Inc. He encounters defunct diagnostic X-ray equipment regularly, and it's his business to know exactly what to do with it. For the most part, there is no guesswork.

"It comes in and we take it apart," says Entwistle. "I am truly the end-of-life person in this process. I'm the end of the line."

A push toward environmental health and regulation has increased recycling across the country and much of the world, but the business of recycling is also encouraged by financial opportunity. The green movement in the medical equipment industry is much the same as any other industry that recycles. A technologically advanced piece of equipment like a CT or PET scanner or MRI has a relatively long lifespan and can be bought and sold a number of times before being considered officially obsolete and retired from the regular medical field, but the usefulness does not end there. Some medical technologies can be used for other applications, in veterinarian medicine, for instance, or converted for use in industrial applications. If equipment doesn't find a new career in one of those fields, several imaging technologies, including X-ray, CT, MRI and PET can be processed by specialized recycling companies and broken down into individual commodities - plastics, steel, aluminum and copper, etc. - to be resold in those markets.

"All of these materials will go back in as feed stock for new manufacturing," says Entwistle. "They go to refineries in the United States and also overseas, but it's all broken down."

Even nuclear medicine technologies, such as linear accelerators, which use depleted uranium shielding, and gamma knives, which house radioactive materials, can be rendered perfectly safe and can be recycled after being properly processed by a licensed and trained professional for the removal of environmentally sensitive materials.

Entwistle may occasionally recycle X-ray equipment, but other types of equipment like CT, MR and gamma knives are outside his league, he says. Enter Martin Campbell, president of Campbell Technological Resources, Inc., and Tommy Geske, president of Sunrise Medical Technology, Inc. These gentlemen are versed in the "scrapping out" of most of these and other types of medical equipment.

More Industry Headlines