The healthcare sector contributes approximately 4.4% of global carbon emissions. This means that there is an urgent need for the sector to become less resource intensive and adopt circularity. Yet, healthcare faces a unique challenge: how can providers embrace sustainability without compromising the fundamental requirement of patient safety? This delicate balance defines circular healthcare: an approach that reimagines medical equipment lifecycles, pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, and supply chains while maintaining rigorous safety standards.
What is Circular Healthcare?
Circular healthcare is a transformative approach that applies circular economy principles to medical devices, medicines, facilities but also business models and supply chains. Instead of the traditional linear model of “take-make-waste,” circular healthcare creates closed-loop systems. In these systems, resources maintain their value and utility for as long as possible.
At its core, circular healthcare includes several interconnected strategies:
- Resource optimization: Minimizing the consumption of virgin materials, energy, and water while maximizing the value extracted from each resource.
- Product longevity: Designing medical devices and equipment for durability, reparability, and upgradability.
- Collaborative networks: Building partnerships across the healthcare value chain, from manufacturers and providers to patients and recyclers, to enable effective resource circulation.
- Regenerative systems: Creating processes that not only minimize environmental impact but also actively contribute to environmental regeneration.
The circular model recognizes that healthcare’s environmental impact extends far beyond hospital walls. It includes medical device manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, supply chain logistics, and end-of-life management. By addressing sustainability at each stage, circular healthcare creates systems that benefit patient health, environmental health, and economic sustainability.
As John McCarthy, Business Value Consulting Senior Director for Life Sciences & Healthcare at Dassault Systèmes, states, “Life sciences companies have several factors they have to balance all at once: the health of the patient, equitable healthcare for society, as well as the health of the planet.”
The Economic and Regulatory Landscape
Sustainability and profitability are not opposing forces. Circular business models create value through resource efficiency, extended product lifecycles, risk mitigation, and brand differentiation. Reducing the consumption of materials, energy, and water lowers operational costs. At the same time, refurbishment programs generate new revenue streams and make advanced medical technology more accessible.
Regulatory frameworks are also evolving to support these initiatives. The FDA’s collaboration with medical device manufacturers on reprocessing protocols shows how regulators can enable sustainability without compromising safety. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations hold manufacturers accountable for products especially at the end-of-life, incentivizing designs that facilitate recovery, repair and recycling. These developments create opportunities for forward-thinking organizations to lead circular healthcare adoption.
Building a Circular Healthcare Framework
A comprehensive circular framework integrates sustainability across three pillars: materials, products, and enterprise operations.
- Materials: Selecting biocompatible, sustainably sourced materials that can be safely recycled or biodegraded at end-of-life. This includes transitioning away from problematic substances while maintaining the sterility and performance requirements essential for patient safety.
- Products: Medical devices and pharmaceuticals should be designed for longevity, repair, and eventual material recovery. Modular architectures, for example, allow component replacement rather than complete device disposal.
- Enterprise: This means embedding circular principles throughout operations, from supply chain management and manufacturing processes to facility operations and waste management protocols. It also extends to innovative business models such as the functional economy and product-as-a-service.
Technology Enablers for Circular Healthcare
Successfully implementing this framework requires sophisticated technological infrastructure, where virtual twins, eco-design, lifecycle assessment (LCA) tools, and green chemistry serve as enabling technologies. These tools empower organizations to model scenarios, quantify environmental impacts, and identify optimization opportunities before committing resources. For example, green chemistry calculations and process optimization allow scientists to evaluate alternative approaches during the design phase. Access to databases of green solvents, process mass intensity calculations, and environmental impact metrics helps researchers identify sustainable pathways without compromising efficacy or safety.
Through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Life Sciences & Healthcare companies can integrate virtual twins, LCA and green chemistry principles to model sustainable practices at every stage of development. This centralizes data and enables eco-design strategies, allowing manufacturers to simulate product performance, design for circularity from the outset, reduce waste, and enhance product lifecycle sustainability. By leveraging these tools, organizations can comply with regulatory standards while innovating for a healthier, more sustainable future.
Circular Medical Devices: Innovation and Sustainability
Medical devices must meet strict regulatory requirements, maintain sterility, and perform flawlessly. This complexity means that circular solutions must satisfy patient safety, affordability, and environmental responsibility simultaneously. With approximately 90% of medical device waste being single-use, innovation is critical. Creating truly circular medical devices requires integrating sustainability from the earliest design stages. This includes careful material selection, standardization of components, and design for disassembly to enable component reuse and material recovery.
Rethinking Medical Device Reuse: The Endoscope Example
One area of significant progress is the reuse of endoscopes. These flexible instruments allow for minimally invasive examinations. Historically, endoscopes posed a sustainability challenge due to the waste from single-use devices and the intensive cleaning protocols for reusable ones. The FDA has now collaborated with manufacturers to establish protocols for safe cleaning, disinfection, and reuse within hospitals.
This process highlights a key paradox. McCarthy notes that “in some cases, the cleaning process uses more environmental materials, such as water and strong solvents, than it does to produce a single-use device.” This complexity underscores the need for sophisticated lifecycle assessment tools to evaluate the entire environmental impact of a product’s journey.
Stryker’s Refurbishment Program: A Model for High-Value Equipment
High-capital medical equipment offers different opportunities. Stryker, a leading medical technology company, has pioneered a comprehensive refurbishment and remanufacturing program. This initiative focuses on high-cost hospital equipment like surgical robots and ambulance stretchers.
Stryker can refurbish these devices at approximately 60% of the original purchase price. This provides a compelling value proposition, allowing hospitals to acquire advanced equipment at reduced costs. The sustainability impact is equally significant, as it extends the operational life of equipment, reduces demand for virgin materials, and minimizes electronic waste.
Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals
Pharmaceutical manufacturing represents another frontier for circular healthcare innovation. Pharma companies are reimagining production processes to reduce water consumption, optimize energy use and minimize waste generation.
McCarthy identifies several key strategies: “Biopharma companies, for example, look at: How can they make manufacturing of treatments greener? Can they use less water for cleaning by scaling out or scaling up the process? By having that process run several times in parallel? Or by scaling up that process into a larger bioreactor? Is it more sustainable to use large stainless steel tanks that need to be cleaned or is it more sustainable to have smaller batches that utilize single-use materials that don’t have to be cleaned?”
These questions require in-depth analysis that balances resource consumption, waste generation and production efficiency. Technology plays an essential role in enabling pharmaceutical companies to model different manufacturing scenarios and identify the most sustainable approaches.
Addressing the Medical Waste Challenge
Medical waste disposal represents a significant environmental challenge within the circular healthcare ecosystem. Healthcare facilities must manage waste with extreme caution due to biohazards and infection risks, often requiring incineration or specialized landfill processes that generate substantial carbon emissions.
Circular healthcare approaches aim to minimize waste generation at the source. Medical device companies are rethinking product design to incorporate biocompatible, eco-friendly materials that maintain performance while reducing environmental impact. Packaging innovations reduce plastic use & waste while ensuring products remain sterile throughout the supply chain.
Device remanufacturing and refurbishment programs keep equipment in circulation longer, reducing the volume of medical waste requiring disposal. When devices do reach end-of-life, manufacturers are developing protocols for material recovery and recycling that can reclaim valuable components and materials.
A Sustainable Future for Healthcare
The transition to circular healthcare also means capitalizing on an opportunity to build more resilient, equitable, and cost-effective systems. By integrating circular principles, the industry can meet the needs of patients today while protecting the planet for future generations.
The examples from endoscope reuse, Stryker’s refurbishment program, and pharmaceutical manufacturing innovations demonstrate that circular healthcare is both achievable and advantageous. With the right technology and a commitment to both patient safety and sustainability, the healthcare industry can lead the way. Human health and planetary health are inseparable, and building a sustainable healthcare system requires transformation today.
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