4 research outputs found
Invoking ‘Empathy for the Planet’ through Participatory Ecological Storytelling: From Human-Centered to Planet-Centered Design
No full textIn sustainable design and innovation, appreciation of the Planet as an equal stakeholder with humans and businesses continues to rise. Yet a consistent challenge arises in that people have difficulties relating to the nonhuman and interpret the world in terms of human values and experiences. We need more practical tools to stimulate a connection, especially in its affective dimension, to the Planet and to include nonhuman stakeholders in sustainability developments. To anchor Planetary understanding and considerations, we investigate the role of participatory storytelling to stimulate a reappraisal of the needs of nonhuman stakeholders through empathy building. To posit this, we defined empathy for the Planet as a holistic relationship with human and nonhuman stakeholders. We facilitated workshops where design students, design professionals, and business stakeholders could co-create environmental stories using human and nonhuman character personas. We analyzed the personas, stories, and participants’ feedback on the process experience and impact and observed that story creators experienced empathy for the Planet through projecting and blending their own emotions and intents onto the characters. We discuss, therefore, how ecological story co-creation can be a tool for self-reflection, collective sense-making, and the inclusion of the voice of Planetary stakeholders relevant for sustainable design and to drive sustainability engagement in general. This research confirms the role of stories and imagination in creating a bridge to the natural world through new, human and nonhuman, perspectives.</p
How to Close the Loop on Catheters: Exploring limitations and opportunities at the end-of-life of single-use catheters
No full textWhile lives are saved through the use of medical devices; they have a significant negative impact on the environment. In particular single-use medical devices make up a large part of the healthcare sector’s negative environmental impact as they contribute significantly to generating more medical waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Approximately 90% of medical waste consists of single-use products or components. The incineration of medical waste is still common practice, leading to harmful environmental and human health effects. Additionally, devices that could potentially be recycled, reused, or repurposed in another way to help close the loop of a product’s life cycle are incinerated instead, which sustains and fuels the unsustainable linear economic model. This research aims to identify opportunities at the end-of-life of single-use catheters that could sustain value and limit the amounts of medical waste produced. A method is presented that supports approaching this aim, called the recovery assessment tool for single-use catheters. The presented method allows for identifying components of a catheter that limit or provide opportunities for recovery purposes at the end-of-life. Two protocols have been developed to guide this process. The first protocol covers the dismantling process to explore the build-up of a catheter and separate components to establish a Bill of Materials. The second protocol describes the procedure that was followed to analyse a catheter. The Bill of Materials is used as an input to assess a catheter at the sub-assembly and component level. The assessment evaluates a catheter on three types of indices: disassembly indices, hygienic recovery indices and material recovery indices. The outcome of the assessment is a graphical visualization that highlights areas of attention for recovery. By interpreting these results using the explanations given with each index, components can be identified that limit or provide opportunities for recovery purposes at the end-of-life of single-use catheters. Two single-use catheters of Philips were assessed as a case study with the proposed methodology. A Bill of Materials for each catheter was established with the results of a material investigation in the lab. The results of the case studies led to several limitations and opportunities. The first limitation is that cleaning catheters can be challenging, given their long tubular shape and the fact that almost all components and sub-assemblies cannot be disassembled and reassembled again. This limitation may impede recovery options since catheters must be cleaned and sterilised after use if considered for recovery purposes because they come into contact with blood. Additionally, catheters are lightweight devices, meaning they make up only a small amount of the piles of medical waste produced daily. Still, catheters are high-value devices; therefore, any form of recovery is valuable. Opportunities for recovery at the end-of-life of catheters have also been identified. It was determined that catheters contain valuable metals that could be recovered to reduce medical waste, sustain value and potentially decrease the demand to collect raw materials. Also, most of the materials used in the case studied catheters seem compatible with ethylene oxide sterilisation which provides an opportunity for recovery; however, this must be thoroughly validated. Finally, it is suggested to reconsider the design or build-up of a catheter. Investigating opportunities for a hybrid design and exploring the possibility of recovery of functional modules for new catheters at the end-of-life are suggested. The outcomes of this research indicate that closing the loop on single-use catheters is a complex problem in terms of circularity due to their hygienic criticality and light weight compared to the waste produced daily per hospital bed. The amount of medical waste produced due to the use of catheters is only the tip of the iceberg.Biomedical Engineerin
Circular economy business requirements
No full textIn 2016 Philips launched its sustainability program Healthy People Sustainable Planet, and set the ambitious target to generate 15% of its total revenue from circular propositions by 2020. In order to achieve this target Philips not only defined to what extend existing revenues met circular criteria, but also defined on what steps would be required to improve the performance in the years to come. Additionally, Philips embarked on a broader journey of business transformation and capability building to sustain future growth after 2020. This paper explains how the concept of circular economy is being translated by Philips into actionable circular revenues and business requirements
