After a remarkable winter filled with landmark progress for medical device reprocessors and remanufacturers, AMDR’s sleeves are rolled up and ready for an exciting few months ahead of us!A new study published in the journal Sustainability demonstrates that hospitals can substantially cut global warming emissions by using reprocessed and remanufactured medical devices in their electrophysiology (EP) labs. In fact, the carbon footprint associated with reprocessed versions of EP devices is about half that of using original equipment and reprocessed versions were superior on 13 of 16 environmental categories evaluated. The research comes from the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety, and Energy Technology UMSICHT.I’m enormously proud of AMDR’s successful March 11 webinar, “Promoting a Circular and Affordable Health Care System in Europe,” which featured members of the EU Parliament, EU Commission, environmental advocates, hospital supply chain experts and the lead study researcher from Fraunhofer, who amplified the urgent need for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the health care supply chain to over 100 participants.
Next stop: Spotlighting — to American audiences and the rest of the world – the urgent need to expand the growing circular economy into the health care sector by embracing green, resilient and sustainable medical device reprocessing..
Join our growing community on LinkedIn to have a front row seat or to take part in the discussion!
Dan Vukelich, Esq., CAE
President & CEO
Association of Medical Device Reprocessors www.amdr.org
2019 Reprocessing by the Numbers
In 2019, the SUD reprocessing and remanufacturing industry continued aggressive growth, saving hospitals at least $544M and diverting over 15M pounds of waste from landfills and incinerators. AMDR’s infographic highlighting our members’ global reprocessing activities is available for
both U.S. and EU audiences.
Combining Life Cycle Assessment and Circularity Assessment to Analyze Environmental Impacts of the Medical Remanufacturing of Electrophysiology Catheters
January 17th, 2021
Sustaining value after the end-of-life to improve products’ circularity and sustainability has attracted an increasing number of industrial actors, policymakers, and researchers. Medical products are considered to have great remanufacturing potential because they are often designated as single-use products and consist of various complex materials that cannot be reused and are not significant in municipal recycling infrastructure.