How Implants and Prosthetic Limbs Get Recycled and Reused

Every year , gazillion of pacemaker , metal pelvic arch , and prosthetics outlast the bodies they ’re design for . But these aesculapian devices could very well go on to have a 2d - life — in elevator car , wind turbines , and even another someone .

The implant are , after all , full of worthful alloy like titanium or cobalt alloy . Cremation makes the metallic element easily recoverable , spell Frank Swainin a absorbing investigation into the hereafter of medical devices .

The Dutch company Orthometals , for instance , collect 250 tons of metal every year from European crematoriums and sells it all to car and airplane manufacturers . The city of Bristol in England has even proposedrecycling these metal into road signs . And , in the U.S. , Implant Recycling sells crematory metal back to medical gadget manufacturer . So there ’s never severalize where grandma ’s old hip joint might end up .

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Your Dead Relative ’s Metal Parts Are Being Turned Into Road mark

For more complicated equipment like pacemakers and prosthetic limb , charities are at the forefront of a mature movement to repurpose them in develop countries . The UK charity Pace4Life goes to funeral parlors , where it collects pacemakers for consumption in India , and the Tennessee - based Stand With Hope send prosthetic branch to Ghana — just to name a few .

But plenty of implants still get buried with the masses they ’re in . “ So it ’s likely that the archeologist of future centuries will bring out rum objects in the Graf of the millennian drained : silicone polymer grip , plastic tooth and grave metal ivory , ” writes Swain . You have to wonder what cyborg graveyard future archaeologist will think they have encountered , but heck , they ’ll in all probability be be tangible bionic man by then . [ BBC ]

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