Biodegradable nitrile gloves could help reduce waste (2025)

Key takeaways:

• Biodegradable nitrile gloves matched or outperformed standard nitrile gloves in a range of durability tests.
• They are more expensive than standard, nonbiodegradable gloves.

PHOENIX — Biodegradable nitrile gloves are as safe and reliable as standard gloves and, according to a presenter, offer an opportunity to reduce the amount of nonbiodegradable medical waste deposited in landfills.

“A lot of health care waste is things we need to help people get through these surgeries and live better lives, but it has to go somewhere,” Julie Miller, MS, principal project engineer at ECRI, said during a presentation at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology annual conference.

Experts have noted widely that medical waste — drug packaging, gloves, masks, a wide range of single-use products and tools — contributes to the health industry’s significant carbon footprint. One study showed that 12 doctors’ glove use in 1 year produced a carbon footprint of roughly 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which is the equivalent of running a gasoline-powered car engine for 5 years.

For example, WHO reported that during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 18,000 tons of gloves and 3,000 tons of masks were shipped to medical facilities in Africa alone, a statistic that does not include waste produced by the general public.

According to Miller, the ASTM International D6319-19 standard for nitrile gloves includes:

• that the acceptable quality limit for pinholes per batch of gloves is 2.5;
• sizing requirements from extra small to extra large, which include guidelines for minimum thickness (near the palm and fingertip), minimum length and width tolerance;
• a minimum physical requirement after being manufactured of 14 megapascals (MPa) and 500% elongation; and
• a minimum physical requirement six or more months after being manufactured of 14 MPa and 400% elongation.

For a glove to be considered biodegradable, ASTM standards require that microbial breakdown of material in an anaerobic environment such as a landfill, based on a simulated anaerobic environment, happen over the course of months or years instead of centuries, Miller said.

Miller compared the thickness, tensile strength, elongation and modulus of biodegradable gloves with testing of standard nitrile gloves she conducted in 2023, comparing gloves that were straight out of the box with gloves that were aged in an oven to simulate being 6 or more months old.

Out of the box, the biodegradable gloves were similar to standard gloves. The biodegradable gloves were .055 mm thick, displayed a tensile stress level of 34.6 MPa and survived 671% elongation. The standard gloves were also .055 mm thick, displayed a tensile strength of 30.8 MPa and survived elongation to 708%.

Among aged gloves, the biodegradable nitrile did slightly better than the standard — .054 mm vs. .055 mm in thickness, 36.7 MPa vs. 25.2 MPa in tensile stress and survived elongation to 671% compared with 653%.

Miller employed a peg test to quantify how well users performed tasks while wearing gloves compared with when they were bare-handed. For a test that required users to pick up a wooden peg and place it in a hole, people wearing biodegradable gloves did slightly better than those wearing standard gloves: 15.1 pegs compared with 14.3 pegs. When the participants in each group did the test bare-handed, the biodegradable glove group placed 16 pegs compared with 14.8 in the standard group.

Additionally, qualitative testing by the glove users found that they had greater confidence in the biodegradable gloves (90% vs. 86%), though found they were more difficult to smooth or take off (90% vs. 94%) and they made a tape task more difficult (71.7% vs. 80% completed it), but more people liked their fit (76.7% vs. 68%) and found them comfortable (81.7% vs. 78%).

The biodegradable gloves were also more expensive than standard gloves. According to Miller, the average care area cost per patient per day per pair is $0.157 for biodegradable compared with $0.132 for standard.

Miller said she has seen biodegradable gloves in a handful of medical offices but is not aware of any widespread adoption.

“The product is there,” Miller said. “The manufacturers, I’m sure, would love to have some interest and, given what I saw in the testing, they’re pretty comparable in performance and user likability — it’s worth a shot.”

For more information:

Julie Miller, MS, can be reached at jmiller@ecri.org.