Nitrile gloves are widely used in medical and industrial fields as well as everyday life. 

    Regardless of the industry, people probably use disposable gloves every single day. Studies show that a single lab can end up using around 5,000 pounds of disposable gloves a year. By now, there are millions of disposable gloves in our landfills. This has been a serious problem.

    With the growing concern for corporate sustainability, whether you work in a lab, medical facility, industrial plant or even a beauty salon, your responsibility to take care of our environment cannot be ignored.

    So how can we reduce the number of disposable gloves that end up in landfills without having to stop using them?

    Recycle.

    In fact, nitrile rubber is a recyclable material in its own right, and there is only one special circumstance in which nitrile gloves should be thrown in a landfill instead of going to a recycling facility ---- - when they are contaminated with hazardous chemicals or other toxic substances. Once they are contaminated, they are considered hazardous waste. Basically, nitrile gloves are the most acceptable of the different types of disposable gloves due to the fact that this type of glove does not contain latex, making it hypoallergenic.

    When recycling the used uncontaminated disposable gloves, make sure that you have separated them from the contaminated ones and have separate containers for each glove before sending them to recycling programs. If a nitrile glove is qualified as hazardous waste, it should not be mixed with the recycling batch. Otherwise, the whole recycling batch will be contaminated. Furthermore, before being put in the recycling facility, those uncontaminated gloves that have been used for housecleaning, food preparation or hair dyes must be washed and dried first.

    Finally, recycled nitrile gloves can be marketed as raw materials or turned into recycled products, such as trash cans and park benches.