Digital health in a Circular Economy

DiCE is a project to work with the medical device industry to transition to circular product design, rather than single-use products. The collaboration involves 20 organisations from nine countries, representing manufacturers, researchers, and recyclers, including Janssen and Philips. It is funded through the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme.
Making electronic healthcare products circular is important because the healthcare industry emits 4.4% of global CO2 emissions, according to Health Care Without Harm. This is almost double the emissions of the aviation or shipping industries. In addition to climate change, the industry causes material waste and other pollution, and its e-waste consumes critical raw materials mined in foreign countries.
DiCE will help this by redesigning four products as case studies: an ePaper label, a smart wearable sensor, a smart pill box and an endo-cutter used in surgical procedures. Each presents different challenges, and together they represent most electronic healthcare products, both medical and non-medical, for both reuse/remanufacturing and recycling. The project, with partners across the entire product life cycle, targets every point from design to disposal and recovery.
Historically, medical devices have often been designed for single use and have been difficult to recycle or recover at end of life, because they may pose contamination risks to anyone handling them. There are also stringent legal regulations on the products, materials and how they are handled. This project aims to identify these barriers and find design solutions to overcome them at scale across many product types, stakeholders, and usage scenarios.