ARTICLES

What You Can Do to Improve Sustainability

Contributing to the circular economy means making products that allow for responsible reuse. Over time, the reusable devices reprocessed in an ethical and environmentally sound reprocessing system have a significant positive impact on waste, pollution, and the financial soundness of the healthcare industry.

Continue reading to learn more.

Transforming the Medical Device Industry: Road Map to a Circular Economy

Environmental Health, 2020

In 2020, MacNeill et al. analyzed the impact of a linear healthcare economy and developed an initial framework for transitioning to a circular economy. (A circular economy keeps manufactured products in circulation, spreading out the environmental and resource costs over a long-time frame, optimizing the ability to recycle these products, and minimizing the need to extract additional resources to achieve good clinical outcomes.)

Acknowledging that this transition faces barriers, they note that three key stakeholder categories in the world of healthcare share responsibility for these barriers. The stakeholders include:

Device consumers
Original equipment manufacturers
Regulatory, accredited, and professional standards organizations

Each group of stakeholders has both the obligation to assess how their current operating philosophy affects the environment and the responsibility to make practice changes based on evidence.

UN Secretary General Annual Message

2023

In 2023, the U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Gutteres, shared his thoughts during the first International Day of Zero Waste. He noted that every minute of every day, the volume of plastic waste dumped into the ocean is the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastic. Every minute. Every day.

Mr. Gutteres exhorted manufacturers to design products using fewer resources and materials. At Cenorin, that is precisely what we have focused on since our inception.

Infection Prevention, Planetary Health, and Single-Use Plastics

JAMA, November 2023

There is little evidence that single-use devices decrease infection risks, and there is considerable evidence that dependence on single-use devices has a profound impact on the environment while also increasing the potential for breakdowns in the supply chain. There is robust evidence that it is easiest and most profitable for the medical device industry to manufacture single-use devices, whether or not it makes sense clinically.

The authors use evidence to promote three strategies to decrease dependence on single-use devices:

Reform national guidelines on infection prevention coming from the CDC (HICPAC)
Update the requirements for reporting infections related to devices, both single-use and reusable
Provide incentives to the US FDA and to industry to focus on innovation and improving design of reusable devices

They conclude that, while there may be select devices where single-use is the optimal solution, the unbridled and groundless incorporation of single-use devices as an infection prevention measure is harmful and unsustainable.

The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health

Annals of Global Health, March 2023

The Minderoo-Monaco Commission is an objective scientific review of peer-reviewed literature (which has also been peer reviewed itself). Their focus on plastics is comprehensive and provides insight into the impact of plastics on human health, the environment, economics, and social justice.

In addition to the multitude of health problems attributable to some aspect of plastic production and use, they describe the energy required to manufacture plastics. They note that plastic production alone is responsible for 4% of global greenhouse gas, more than that produced by the entire country of Brazil. Most of the plastic is single-use. The U.S. costs of treating illnesses caused by the chemicals used in plastics productions in 2015 was well over $900 billion.

Further, disposing of plastic is inefficient (it’s not easy to recover or recycle), which means plastics and their chemicals are directly responsible for immense volumes of pollution. Cleaning up pollution is expensive, and the burden rests with citizens and governments rather than with the petrochemical and plastics manufacturers who are responsible for it.