Alex Fong, insights and sustainability lead, Owen Mumford, addresses the environmental impact of single-use drug delivery devices and emphasises the role of life-cycle assessment (LCA) in sustainable design.
Healthcare has seen a move away from reusable items to single-use disposables in recent decades – driven by benefits including infection control and lower costs. In Europe, it is estimated that 36% of healthcare waste is plastic – and 42% of healthcare plastic waste is incinerated, harming the environment. In the UK, the National Health Service (the biggest employer in Europe, to provide context on its scale) is not only one of the biggest producers of healthcare waste in Europe but also the biggest user of single-use plastic, according to Innovate UK’s Knowledge Transfer Network.
Making single-use more sustainable
There is no escaping the fact that many medical devices need to be single use and made of petroleum-based plastics. Material choices for drug delivery devices, for example, are currently limited to medical-grade options that have undergone rigorous testing for sterility, zero chemical leaching and biocompatibility with the relevant drug.
A lot of research and development work is going on into recycled materials or bio-based plastics as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics in drug delivery devices – but they are not yet at the required standard or production levels. In the meantime, the industry is still relying on single-use devices to meet demand levels as well as safety and compliance criteria. This means it is crucial that these devices are optimised to minimise their environmental impact.
Owen Mumford
Alex Fong, insights and sustainability lead, Owen Mumford
Sustainability can be approached from multiple angles during the early stages of drug delivery device development – taking into account the entire product life cycle from concept development, material selection, design and engineering and manufacturing to packaging, transportation, sales, use and end-of-life disposal.
But with so many different factors involved, it can be a challenge to ensure the correct choices are made to minimise the effects on the environment – and to avoid unintended knock-on effects in other areas of the supply chain. Making a design more robust so that a device can be reused, for example, might seem to be the environmentally friendly choice – but the sustainability benefits could be outweighed if the device is heavier as a result and the environmental costs of transporting it are therefore higher.
An intuitive LCA tool
This is just the kind of scenario where Owen Mumford’s life-cycle-based eco-design tool has a valuable role to play. It allows a manufacturer to autonomously model any product concept across any supply chain, from concept to disposal – reducing the traditional complexity of life-cycle assessment (LCA). The tool provides a firm foundation for key sustainable design strategies such as using recycled materials, deploying renewable energy and designing for circularity.
LCA is designed to provide a comprehensive, data-driven and systematic approach to discovering opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of a product through every phase of its life – from raw material acquisition and production to use, end-of-life treatment, recycling and final disposal. It provides the necessary information for better decision making.
To improve access to the wealth of information an LCA can uncover, Owen Mumford’s tool is designed to be used by people who are not LCA experts. The tool – created in conjunction with a leading LCA consultancy – is based on information from LCA database Ecoinvent and takes into account 17 potential impact categories for drug delivery devices.
These include climate change, water and land use, human toxicity, and fossil and mineral resources. The categories are associated with three potential negative effects – damage to resource availability, damage to human health or damage to ecosystems. The aim is to highlight a variety of sources of environmental damage and identify where in the product life cycle they occur.
A variety of device characteristics can be assessed using the tool – ranging from material choice and supply, component weights and packaging to manufacturing location, transportation and end-of-life scenarios. The effects of any changes to these characteristics can then be reviewed to see if they improve the overall sustainability ‘score’ – and to ensure there are no unintended negative consequences.
Innovating through sustainability
In this way, sustainability can also help drive innovation – ensuring that size, weight and functionality are optimised, for example, with innovative part design and maximised device life, as well as encouraging energy-efficient (and therefore cheaper) manufacturing methods. LCA can also help challenge the business models involved in getting a device to market – and prompt a fresh look at how users interact with their devices so that they are not simply thrown away after use.
If products are to be easier and cheaper to recycle, for example, they need to be easy to disassemble. There is the added benefit of reduced waste and transportation costs if design is simplified, device size optimised and packaging kept to a minimum. The carbon impact of processing and shipping can also be cut – without compromising the device itself – by replacing metal components with suitable polymers.
The majority of digital drug delivery devices currently require a disposable element to meet regulatory and safety requirements. But disposable electronics would be too expensive to be viable and would fall foul of electronic waste disposal regulations. To address these challenges, Owen Mumford adopted an innovative approach and developed the reusable UniSafe auto-injector – a reliable and reusable ‘shell’ with optional connectivity, that houses a 1mL disposable safety syringe. The product retains user-friendly features, but offers new sustainable and digital elements without compromising patient safety.
Informed design decisions
With so many competing factors to navigate on the path to sustainability, LCA has become more important than ever. Stakeholders across the medical device industry are striving to create greener products by reducing the use of harmful materials and improving the ease of recycling and disposal. A user-friendly LCA tool can help signpost the route to success, enabling informed decision-making right from the start of a drug delivery device development project – for the benefit of manufacturers, healthcare systems and patients, as well as the environment.