The global healthcare industry is starting to seriously embrace sustainable management and greener purchasing policies. Health professionals and healthcare administrators are rapidly realizing that developing and running a green facility does not have to be costly and that in many cases there are real operational savings to be made. The sheer scale of the task for the medical sector is huge because almost every aspect of a healthcare facility faces a sustainable challenge.
There are a host of opportunities in the healthcare sector to introduce polymers with smaller ecological footprints. Polymer materials appear almost everywhere in the medical environment. From the hospital buildings themselves plus the fabrics and furniture they contain through to the wide variety of medical equipment and devices that are used.
Safety concerns are likely to hinder traditional approaches to sustainability such as reuse and recycling, but medical technology companies can implement green design principles in other ways.