40 Years of Making Healthcare Safer

Dan Daniels founded Integrated Sharps Disposal Systems in Melbourne with a prototype sewerage-pipe collector, followed by its first purpose-designed reusable sharps container – the Funnel Series. St Vincent’s Hospital became the first customer to adopt the reusable container technology. As Australia grappled with the AIDS epidemic and new anti-landfill legislation, Daniels successfully challenged the EPA to accept safer and more sustainable alternatives to burning clinical waste.

Daniels expanded into Western Australia – establishing its second plant in Perth. We entered New South Wales with a $3000 secondhand truck, while incinerator rivals formed an illegal association (ANZMWIG) to lobby against us and prevent market penetration. Competitors even planted needles in containers and bugged our corporate offices – sabotage that federal police uncovered, cementing the company’s reputation for resilience.

The “Hammermill” launched, processing 350 tonnes of medical waste weekly. Rebranding as The Daniels Corporation, the company weathered PR smear campaigns and bribery attempts from rival waste firms to prevent its expansion in the domestic market, but through it all remained focused on its mission of clinical impact and safety transformation. Our first advisory board was established, and we started giving from our charitable foundation.

The first Sharpsmart container was trialled in Middlemore Hospital in New Zealand. Daniels established a joint venture in Canada and shipped its first international order, while also entering into the US and UK via joint ventures. We secured 510 FDA approval for our safety technology in the US, and sold our Australian service operations to fund global growth. By the end of the decade, Sharpsmart containers had been validated through rigorous child-safety and infection-control testing worldwide and we had grown from one man and a van to over 100 staff.

In 2005 Neil Robinson joined Daniels as CEO of England to manage our UK joint venture partnership, and one year on we opened operational plants in the South and Midlands with our own logistics teams. In 2008 we won legal action over a failed joint venture partnership; we won, recovering our business and assets and set up Sharpsmart Ltd with our own infrastructure

A 6 year clinical study on our Sharpsmart container was published in the Journal of Infection Control. Our Australian service business was sold for $186 million, redirecting focus toward global expansion. We established our Four Walls hospital partnership strategy, and won the Royal Free TWM contract including 5 hospitals and the first ever NHS non-acute contract. The company rebranded globally to Daniels Health/Sharpsmart, established charitable foundations from the sale of the Australian business, and set an ambitious goal to double the business in 3 years – a goal which was achieved by 2020.

We formed our own property group, building a framework for our future expansion, opened two new plants in Leeds and East London, developed a proprietary container scanning and data capture tool, and launched our first non-burn sharps treatment in the UK. Prior stockpiling of 18 months’ container supply proved pivotal during COVID. Sharpsmart UK rapidly deployed containers for pandemic field hospitals, supported vaccine rollouts, and witnessed the needle administering the world’s first COVID vaccine being disposed in a Sharpsmart container. We won a 7-year Quebec market battle and commissioned a plant in St Jean, while also opening a new processing and treatment site in British Columbia Canada.

Daniels/Sharpsmart reached 2,300 global staff, secured the landmark NHS supply chain framework contract, saw our Ontario CA facility became our first ‘no waste to landfill’ site implementing energy to waste treatment technology, established in-house manufacturing in Racine Wisconsin, and launched robotics and AI-driven quality control systems. Celebrating 40 years in January 2026, our single year growth surpassed the growth achieved across three decades in Australia – marking sustained innovation and market leadership.