Our Story
The story of Sharpsmart UK is not your typical narrative of a company starting out to make something quicker, easier or more economical; it started with a very earnest quest by an entrepreneurial engineer to reduce incidents of sharps injuries from clinical waste handling in healthcare.
For Dan Daniels, our business founder and the man that has spent over thirty years tirelessly advocating for higher safety standards in healthcare, the vision was birthed in a rather serendipitous way. While studying for a microbiology degree by day and running a family owned hotel by night, Dan had a chance encounter with a microbiologist by the name of Alan Perceval, which would forever alter his life course. Alan responded to Dan’s trading post listing for a second hand washing machine, and the conversations that were to follow from the $45 exchange, birthed the bold and unconventional idea that microbiology teamed with solution-driven innovation and entrepreneurialism, could save lives.
Some would call it an "A-ha!" moment--for Dan Daniels, he was simply presented with a reality which he felt he could not ignore. This confronting reality was the Aids epidemic in Australia in 1986. Previously unimagined, this disease bought to the forefront the very real threat to healthcare workers and patients alike that an encounter with a used syringe could be potentially deadly or in the very least irrevocably life altering.
In 33 years, from a home garage with nothing but makeshift PVC waste tubes and an irrepressible dream, Sharpsmart has grown to become one of the most influential healthcare service companies in the world. Its safe practices have become the benchmark of global standards, its robotic washing and treatment technologies have achieved benchmark levels of decontamination, and its products are esteemed industry-wide to be unrivalled in protecting the safety of healthcare workers.
With Dan Daniels still leading the Sharpsmart vision of our safer tomorrow, we, in our respective regions across the globe, are evidence of a dream that knows no borders. Across three decades, our innovations and advocacy for safer hospital waste solutions have helped rewrite global health regulations, and our commitment to environmental sustainability has driven us to pioneer solutions that have radically challenged conventional norms. In the United Kingdom, Australia, USA, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, across a globally inspired vision unrestrained by culture or geographical footprint, we are working together to make healthcare safer.
