The session "Advancing Circularity in Healthcare: From Clinical Reuse to Holistic Sustainability Frameworks", presented at CleanMed Europe, examined how circular economy principles can be embedded into healthcare practice through both operational initiatives and strategic frameworks. Emphasis was placed on prioritising actions at the top of the reverse waste hierarchy—refusing, rethinking, redesigning, reducing, reusing and repairing—before waste management becomes necessary. The session also highlighted the value of evidence-based approaches and the benefits of reducing waste while improving clinical resilience.
Clinical Reuse in Practice: Challenges and Insights from Sweden
John Söderberg, Clinical Administrator for Medical Technology at Karolinska University Hospital, presented a hospital-wide initiative to replace single-use patient monitoring accessories with reusable ones. His role, self-defined within the MedTech department, focuses on system innovation with a holistic and long-term perspective. Söderberg illustrated how this project, which began with unassuming items like blood pressure cuffs and ECG leads, became a model for reducing waste and improving clinical service. “This is a story about much more than Velcro cables and tubes. It’s a story about innovation, collaboration and cutting waste while improving service to clinical operations.”
Karolinska, one of Europe’s largest university hospitals, treats over 1.5 million outpatients yearly and operates a Philips patient monitoring system with more than 1,700 monitors. The shift from disposable to reusable accessories addressed logistical inefficiencies and environmental impact, streamlining accessory management and improving continuity of care. The transition eliminated more than 5 tonnes of annual waste. “Imagine this, a patient comes in, they get their own disposable blood pressure cuff, a disposable SPO2 sensor and some other accessories, and at discharge, it all goes in the trash.”
The project’s impact spanned cost, resilience and sustainability. By centralising ownership and storage, Karolinska reduced hoarding and supply shortages, achieving over €1 million in annual savings and cutting 22 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. Patient and staff response was largely positive, and cooperation with regional partners enabled real-time stock monitoring and buffer stockpiles. “It turns out small things do make a big difference, especially when 135,000 of them go in the trash each year.”
The implementation faced some difficulties, including communication gaps and the intensity of changing all accessories within a single week. However, the result is a replicable model already inspiring other hospitals and being expanded to additional product categories.
Setting a Framework for Circularity in Healthcare
Caterina Camerani, Vice President of Sustainability at Mölnlycke Health Care, introduced a white paper calling for a comprehensive framework to assess the sustainability of medical technologies. Drawing from her experience in developing evaluation systems in other sectors, she highlighted the absence of such holistic tools in the medtech industry.
She pointed out that current sustainability assessments often rely on inconsistent data and focus narrowly on greenhouse gas emissions, neglecting other important environmental, social and economic impacts. Factors such as waste generation, water pollution and antimicrobial resistance are rarely accounted for, despite their relevance to healthcare’s overall footprint. “This fragmented approach can lead to poorly informed decisions that can jeopardise the patient’s safety, increase the staff burden, but also increase challenges such as antimicrobial resistance and water scarcity.”
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Camerani argued for an EU-wide harmonised approach that considers the full life cycle of medical products, including manufacturing, packaging, transportation and end-of-life processing. The goal is to empower informed decision-making and integrate sustainability into value-based healthcare. “We really need a holistic life cycle-based assessment for assessing the overall greenhouse gas emission of a device.”
She emphasised the need for cross-sector collaboration, tailored data sharing and the development of widely accepted wellbeing and cost metrics. The white paper is intended as a starting point for collective action among stakeholders from industry, healthcare, policy and patient groups. “This is not to say one solution is better than another… the idea is to look at case to case, including the entire value chain and evaluating all the kinds of impacts (…) to take more informed decisions.”
The session demonstrated how circularity in healthcare can be advanced through hands-on implementation and structural reform. At Karolinska University Hospital, introducing reusable accessories for patient monitoring led to significant reductions in waste and emissions, while improving supply resilience and cutting costs. This showed how a single product group, when addressed systematically, can yield hospital-wide benefits. In parallel, the call for a harmonised sustainability assessment framework stressed the importance of moving beyond narrow metrics, such as greenhouse gas emissions alone, to include factors like water pollution, antimicrobial resistance, workforce wellbeing and the full economic impact of medical technologies.
Addressing these challenges requires consistent data, cross-sector collaboration and tools that support informed decision-making without compromising patient safety or overburdening staff. Together, the session’s contributions reinforced the potential of circular strategies to improve both environmental outcomes and healthcare performance.
Source & Image Credit: CleanMed Europe 2025
