Daniels Health Celebrates 40 Years of Making Healthcare Safer

Global medical waste management provider reflects on four decades of innovation, safety, sustainability and excellence

CHICAGO, IL, UNITED STATES, September 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Daniels Health, a full-service healthcare waste management provider, today marked 40 years since its founding in 1986. The company has grown from a single-product start-up in an Australian garage into a full-service waste vendor now servicing more than 59,000 locations annually across six countries. Operating on a simple but impactful mission to make healthcare safer, the company is currently looking back at the past 40 years of innovation and achievements, including patenting several products aimed at modernizing waste containment, clinical mobility, transportation, and container disinfection, as well as supporting the healthcare industry through the AIDS/HIV and COVID epidemics.

Daniels Health traces its origin story to a chance meeting in 1986 between founder and CEO Dan Daniels and bacteriologist Allan Perceval, who had built a makeshift sharps collection device and was looking for a way to sanitize it. At the time, Daniels was studying microbiology while running his family’s hotel business. The two connected over the sale of a secondhand washing machine that Perceval intended to use to sanitize his invention. Drawn to the underlying problem Perceval was trying to solve, Daniels visited Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital with him and came away convinced that a better-designed container could reduce needlestick injuries at scale, a conviction that became the starting point for Daniels Health.

The company supported hospitals through the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the 1980s and 90s and, more recently, through the COVID-19 pandemic, periods Daniels points to as evidence of its founding premise that healthcare workers should not face preventable injury risk from the equipment meant to protect them.

“This anniversary belongs to the entire Daniels Health team as much as it does to me,” said Dan Daniels, Founder and CEO of Daniels Health. “We started in a garage with one idea and a conviction to make a difference in the lives of healthcare workers. Forty years and six countries later, every person who’s worked here has added something to that idea. I’m grateful for every one of them.”

Forty years in, the company says its focus remains on the same problem it was built to solve, applied at a larger scale.

“The mission hasn’t changed since day one: to make healthcare safer. What’s evolved is our ability to do that at scale, for hospitals of every size, in every market we serve,” said Laura Wakelam, Chief Marketing Officer at Daniels Health.

Over the past four decades, Daniels Health has grown into the second-largest medical waste service infrastructure in the United States, operating more than 36 treatment plants and transfer stations across 47 states, with additional operations in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Its Sharpsmart container system has reduced needlestick injuries by up to 87% across multiple peer-reviewed studies. In its most recent Carbon Emissions Report, the company said its reusable container systems have avoided more than $51 million in costs compared with single-use alternatives and diverted 7,729 metric tons of plastic from landfills, as it works toward a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050. While these achievements are well documented, Daniels doesn’t gloss over how difficult the early years were, and how they shaped the company’s ethos.

“We had years of what I consider failures, going to bed every night thinking everything is broken, we don’t have the banking in place, we’re getting blocked by competitors,” said Dan Daniels, Founder and CEO of Daniels Health. “Having the courage to get up every day and push through to the next level is the making of all of us.”

Daniels Health will continue to share stories and reflections from across its 40-year history in the months ahead at https://info.danielshealth.com/40th-anniversary.

About Daniels Health
Daniels Health is a full-service waste vendor with an approach uniquely focused on the healthcare sector, emphasizing the complete lifecycle of medical waste, including waste generation, transport and treatment. Paramount to this approach is a focused consideration on safety, environmental sustainability, regulatory compliance, labor efficiency, infection control and total costs, while minimizing patient disruptions and the clinical continuum of care. Daniels Health offers advanced technology and containment systems that set a new standard for healthcare waste management, aiming to transform processes through educated partnership, elevating quality standards in clinical environments. For more information, visit danielshealth.com.

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