Before we start looking into such an important question, lets understand what is medical x-ray film recycling and what is the main purpose of it?
The main purpose of disposing of old medical x-rays is to ensure that you follow the privacy rule made by HIPAA, the (PHI) Protected Health information rule was made on Feb 20 2003. What is the PHI has to do with X-ray film?
For these who do not know, medical x-ray films will usually contain few types of information about the patient, administrative, physical, and technical patient's information such as name, age and of course if you look closely at the image in the film it also might tell about the current or previous medical condition of the patient, this is what HIPAA wants to protect the patients from, it is common sense today that all patients are entitled to their privacy, that is why the rule puts the responsibility on the Physician to make sure the medical record is destructed along with all types of patients information on it, administrative, physical, and technical information.
The guidelines for disposal of x-ray film purged as the HIPAA rule states, is that proper care must be taken to destroy medical records and the destruction process must be secured, however facilities do have the choice between an on-site or an off-site destruction process and the type of destruction process needed, by giving the option to facility the rule actually puts a lot of responsibility for any facility that has to purge x-ray film and bring it to final destruction. Another reason of recycling x-ray film.
Another reason for disposing of x-ray film besides clearing space is silver recovery, facilities who has some amount of film usually would want to bring revenue from it in order to recover the film purging labor costs or anything else.
The x-rays do contain silver in various amounts, depending on the type of film and as of today (2022) when silver market price is high, it makes it possible to actually make money on selling x-ray films for recycling.
What makes B.W. Recycling a company to trust?
Experience with sensitive information materials.
B.W. Recycling, Inc is in the x-ray film recycling business for almost 30 years, during that period we have learned many ways of maximizing the destruction process of the medical information, the film is first shredded and than washed in order to recover the silver.
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