Future Healthcare Systems, a Mount Vernon-based medical waste processing company, held a ribbon cutting ceremony on Thursday at its first Connecticut location at 750 South Ave. in Bridgeport.
“There”™s not a single facility like this in the state,” said Charlie Dippolito Jr., senior vice president of the company, whose new operation occupies a 25,000-square-foot plant that was vacant for 17 years. Future Healthcare Systems spent 14 months and $3.5 million to renovate the facility, with a $750,000 grant from the state.
The facility is designed to offer a faster and more cost-effective manner for processing nonhazardous medical waste. Dippolito said Connecticut hospitals and health care facilities have been shipping waste to a transfer station in Middletown, from where the waste is then shipped to a Rhode Island plant to be autoclaved, sterilized using steam under pressure, before being sent to another plant at the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border for its final destruction.
The Bridgeport plant will now enable the waste to be autoclaved locally, with salvageable volume recycled and the remainder incinerated at the Wheelabrator Waste-to-Energy facility three blocks away at 6 Howard Ave.
The plant, which will process waste from facilities in the tri-state area, is expected to employ between 25 and 30 people initially. A key element of hiring will be the providing of employment to local residents who have been unable to find work due to a criminal record.
“That”™s a pillar of my company,” Dippolito said. “I grew up in the Bronx and a lot of the guys I grew up with were incarcerated. I couldn”™t stand when people were turned down for a job because of something stupid they did when they were young.”
Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim also spoke at the ceremony and noted Future Healthcare Systems”™ place within the clean tech business sector evolving across the city”™s south and west ends.
“The new facility is a perfect fit for our green business cluster in the Bridgeport Eco-Technology Park,” he said.
