The operating room is a waste hotspot, and most of it lands in the wrong bin.
Under time pressure, non-hazardous waste goes into the regulated "red bag." Hospitals then pay for specialized disposal of waste that never needed it.
20–30%of a hospital's total waste comes from operating rooms.
57–70%of OR waste is disposed of incorrectly.
~15%of hospital waste is actually hazardous (NLM).
6–8×higher disposal cost when waste is misclassified.
Avoiding solution jumping. My section.
I wrote and presented this part. Before the team picked any technology, we followed five rules.
Start with the user.We looked at the problem from the OR circulating nurse's point of view: a sorting call made in seconds while focused on a patient.
Ask "why" before "how."Staff aren't careless. Ambiguous items go in the red bag because it's the safe choice under regulatory risk and time pressure.
Separate symptoms from the root cause.Overflowing red bags and high bills are symptoms. The root cause is cognitive load at the moment of disposal.
Let the data define the problem.Mis-sorting rates of 57–70% showed where the real opportunity was.
Challenge the industry's assumptions.Competitors ask how to haul waste better. We asked why it gets mis-sorted in the first place.
Training wears off and people turn over, so the fix has to remove the decision.
One container in. Five streams out, plus recycling.
Drop inWaste goes into one container with several conveyor paths.
IdentifyAn AI tracker classifies each item: infectious, hazardous, sharps, radioactive or general.
RecoverThe sorter checks whether plastic or metal can be recycled. About 23% of surgical waste could be.
RouteItems are routed into bins by category and recyclability.
CollectPartners handle pickup, recycling and disposal.
- Revenue
- Monthly subscription plus maintenance instead of buying the machine outright.
- Payback
- The system pays for itself in disposal costs and fines the hospital no longer pays.
- Partners
- Blue-wrap recycling programs and haulers like Clean Management Environmental Group.
Incumbents optimize hauling. Triage removes the error.
Benchmarked against Stericycle, Stryker Sustainability Solutions and Practice Greenhealth, and automated sorters like MSW, Tomra, AMP and PICVISA.
Red ocean
"How do we haul waste better?"
- Pickup and disposal after the fact
- Relies on staff training
- Results fade with turnover
- Sorters built for municipal waste
Triage
"Why is waste mis-sorted in the first place?"
- Works at the point of disposal
- Takes the decision away from staff
- Accurate on every shift
- Recovers recyclables
A $366M U.S. market, starting with urban hospitals.
- $12.96B
- Total market: 215,977 hospitals worldwide at $60,000 a year.
- $366M
- Serviceable market: 6,100 U.S. hospitals.
- $199.4M
- Obtainable market: 3,324 urban U.S. hospitals.
- $70M
- The ask: build and lease 20 sorters, hire the team, run monthly accuracy testing, and reach the largest health systems.
Sources: Statista, "Number of Hospitals Worldwide" (2026); American Hospital Association, "Fast Facts on U.S. Hospitals" (2026).
Reflection and next steps
- Framing drives the solution
- The pitch got much stronger once we centered it on the nurse's split-second decision rather than on the machine.
- Sequence is persuasion
- The order you reveal information in is part of the argument.
- Next steps
- Validate with OR and environmental services staff, confirm recycling partners, and build a pro forma for the raise, starting with a single-site pilot.
What I owned on Triage
- Problem framing
- I wrote and presented "Avoiding Solution Jumping," taking the team from a symptom (overflowing red bags) to the root cause (cognitive load at the moment of disposal) before we chose any technology.
- Visual Value Proposition
- I created Triage's Visual Value Proposition: a one-page picture of the system with a single intake chute, an AI camera and a conveyor into six color-coded bins, plus callouts on how it works, a "today" panel on the 70% red-bag problem, the payoff numbers and our differentiator.
- Story and motion
- I timed the final deck's animations to the spoken narrative and built an animated web version of the pitch.
- Stress-testing
- I worked through the questions an OR nurse would ask, about sterility, sharps, sponge counts and turnover time, to find weak points before we presented.
For hospital operating rooms that overpay to dispose of ordinary waste because nurses must make sorting calls in seconds, Triage is an AI-powered waste sorting system that identifies and routes every item to the right stream automatically.
Team: Saissha Jain, Hamza Nassief, George Shannon, Jessy Elias, Keanna Bantay and Jackson Kaul.