Commitment to Quality

With ever more legislation and increasingly stringent requirements SBA, acting as the voice of the industry is involved in monitoring current and proposed legislation, collating this information and working through the various national and European bodies and simular associations to influence the decision making process with particular reference to health care waste.

All SBA members are obliged - as a pre-requisite for membership - to be registered against ISO 9000 series or an acknowledged equivalent quality system. As such, all SBA members are established quality manufacturers producing high quality technical products under a strict regime of quality control. SBA members rate quality and quality standards as the highest priority.

The SBA logo is therefore the mark of a quality company in whom both customers and suppliers can have utmost confidence.

Commitment to the Environment

General Statement of Intent

SBA members recognise and will comply with all relevant Local, National and European environmental statutory obligations. They are committed to minimizing the adverse effects of their operations on the environment.

SBA members select and design products to be in accordance with appropriate legislation and standards. As the products are single use sterilization packaging for medical devices, members ensure that they meet not only those requirements intended to minimize negative impact on the environment, but also those necessary to guarantee the safety and hygiene of the patient.

Materials and Production

In support of this commitment to patient safety and human health, SBA believes that it is essential to ensure complete traceability through the manufacturing process back to the raw material, and that no post consumer material, or other waste material that could possibly be contaminated, should be used in sterilizable medical packaging.

Production waste will be disposed of by the most environmentally responsible route available to the SBA member.

Post Use Medical Packaging Waste

Handling, segregation and ultimate disposal of used medical packaging waste is the responsibility of the individual health care unit.

For single use medical packaging SBA advocates clean combustion with energy recovery as the current best environmental option for disposal. This position will be subject to regular review in the light of new product design and/or advances in material segregation and recovery.

Bench Marking to improve performance

75% of SBA members have certification against EMAS or ISO 14001. However, they are committed to continual improvement and regularly review their level of environmental performance. In order to benchmark themselves against each other and other companies within the Medical Technology industry across Europe, they regularly carry out a self assessment programme broadly based on ISO 14001. <See More>

The SBA logo is therefore the mark of a environmentally responsible company in whom both customers and suppliers can have utmost confidence.

Code of Practice

SBA members may compete directly with each other as sellers or buyers and it is, therefore, essential that members of the SBA fully comply with EU competition law and equivalent national competition laws. Follow the link to view the SBA Competition Law Compliance Guidelines.