Yes, operating rooms generate a lot of waste, but sometimes that refuse can serve a useful second purpose before it reaches the landfill. Follow these 4 reader-submitted tips to stretch your supply budgets and to make post-op waste work for you.

— Compiled by David Bernard

• Blue wrap goes green. If your OR team rejects a tray while setting up a room because the packaging was torn, or sends back a loaner tray that wasn't used and wasn't exposed to patients, save the clean, uncontaminated blue wrap it came in to line your storage room shelves. This can help to prevent tears in other blue-wrapped trays, saving you the trouble and expense of rewrapping them. If you've already lined all your shelves, blue wrap can also be repurposed for packing and shipping, or donated to local animal shelters for cage liners.

• Protect the pedals. Once you've set out all the contents of a procedure pack, save the plastic bag it came in to cover your equipment's foot pedals during arthroscopies and other fluid-intensive procedures. That keeps them dry, which makes cleanup easier, and protects your OR accessories, saving you the cost of repairs.

• Training exercises. Sometimes supplies fall on the floor, or someone opens the wrong item, or a surgery that's set up is canceled at the last minute. Once the sterility of supplies is compromised, you have to toss them: What a waste of supplies, and your supply budget, right? Not if you save these supplies for use in training exercises, in-services or drills. As an additional bonus, you won't have to open and waste more sterile packages for those education efforts.

• Towels for turnovers. The blue towels that surgeons use to dry off after scrubbing in come in sterile packs of 5, but when only 1 gets used during a case, the rest are discarded as contaminated. If they're not all used before the patient is rolled into the room, why not save them for cleaning your ORs and equipment? It'll save you the expense of buying similar supplies for surface disinfection and terminal cleaning.

Share your great idea for saving time or money at [email protected].