DECATUR, Georgia — Picture an OR nurse opening a surgical pack. She pulls one instrument from the group. It’s used and then discarded — along with the unused instruments from the same pack.

The entire pack of instruments is already accounted for by the payers. And so, driven by the hospital’s need for just-in-time sterile instruments, the single-use convenience packages, and most their contents, become landfill trash.

Imagine a pallet-load of sutures arriving at a hospital, but most of the boxes appear to have been slightly crushed on the corners. The contents may be in perfect condition, but liability prevents the receiving dock from accepting delivery, and it’s costly for the manufacturer to ship them back to the facility, inspect, repackage and redeliver.

And so too, this load of thousands of dollars worth of sterile sutures is thrown out, heads for the landfill.

We are slowly coming to terms with overflowing landfills in the U.S. and we’re recycling paper, newspapers, cans and bottles. But what about those tons of unused medical supplies and equipment tossed away by hospitals, and even manufacturers and distributors?

The good news is that many of these supplies are being intercepted, and a valuable use found for them, with one of the organizations doing this being MedShare International (Decatur, Georgia).

MedShare collects these surplus medical materials, evaluates, sorts, labels and inventories biomedical supplies and then distributes them to places where they are desperately needed — in 95 economically developing countries – the effort carried out by around 500 volunteers who each month work to sort the donated supplies in heaps of black garbage bags.

“Hospitals are caught between regulations, safety issues and payer requirements,” A.B. Short, founder and CEO of MedShare, told Medical Device Daily during a recent visit to the MedShare distribution facility. “So many items are stamped for single use and millions of dollars in supplies go into landfills and incinerators. We recover those supplies and get them to people who need them.”

MedShare doesn’t just throw together miscellaneous aid packages. With help from UPS (Atlanta), it has developed sophisticated inventory and bar coding systems so that recipients can view the inventory over the Internet and create an order list based on exactly what’s available.

As the national effort to recycle and redistribute presses on, this past Wednesday morning some of the volunteers arrived at MedShare’s warehouse in this Atlanta suburb while this reporter watched.

Half the group was senior citizens who went directly to their sorting tables to get to work. The other half, “newbies,” got some training in the process.

Along the walls surrounding the sorting area, dozens of devices — from IV to respiratory intubation supplies — are hanging on the walls, with signs identifying each item so that the volunteers can tear open the garbage bags full of gear and place them in the correct barrels.

They will be inspected for damage, repacked and stored in MedShare’s massive warehouse until somebody from Niger, Uganda or the jungles of Ecuador calls in a need.

The Wednesday group of volunteers smiled and chatted as they inspected, sorted. They are clearly aware that their work with these supplies could save thousands of children and heal the sick and injured. They also know they are working to protect the environment.

MedShare reports that since it inception in 1998 it has donated more than $50 million worth of supplies and equipment that would have taken up an estimated 950,000 cubic feet of space — and a total of 4 million pounds — in U.S. landfills

“Our focus started on the surgical supply side,” Short said. “Although that’s still the mainstay of the products we collect and redistribute, we now have a stainless steel instrument area where the tools — some used, some not — are evaluated by technicians and then redistributed. We have a full-time biomedical engineer who evaluates equipment, such as pulse oximeters and makes sure it all works and is usable for 220 volt environments.”

Short says that occasionally MedShare receives some “really high-tech” equipment, but “those items are not exactly what we need. These countries need the basics first. Besides things like syringes and stethoscopes, we always need ultrasounds, portable X-ray machines and microscopes.”

“We ask them,” Short said, “what are you going to do with those trade-ins? More than likely, they will trash them. That’s when MedShare steps in, and we can offer them a charitable write-off.”

In recent years, MedShare has refined its systems so much that its board challenged its 22-person full-time staff to replicate the operation, in essence develop a kind of franchise program.

Additionally, Accenture (New York) performed a pro bono study of MedShare and recommended that the organization develop national regional operations.

The result: MedShare West is set to open this year in San Francisco.

Short said MedShare has also been approached by groups in Baltimore and Chicago to start Midwest and Northeast divisions.

“We’re morphing into a national operation,” Short said with understandable pride

MedShare gets about 60% of its donations from manufactures and distributors, 40% coming from hospitals. The limit on donations from hospitals is only determined by the geographic range of the organization’s truck pick-ups. Manufacturers, however, can and do send their discards to MedShare from anywhere in the U.S.

MedShare isn’t the first charitable surplus medical supply re-distributor. Short said 25 others in the U.S. are providing similar services.

In October 2007, MedShare co-sponsored a meeting of 19 similar organizations, and the group is in the process of founding an association — Medical Surplus Recovery Organizations — with the goal of promoting community awareness and providing support and best practices for organizations wanting to follow MedShare’s model.

Short invites manufacturers interested in working with MedShare to contact him at (770) 323-5858 or www.medshare.org.