B. Braun Sustainability and Packaging Leader Christian Hutter [Photo courtesy of B. Braun]
B. Braun Sustainability and Packaging Leader Christian Hutter previously offered tips for identifying and eliminating DEHP from medical devices. To continue our coverage of sustainability in medtech, we’d like to share more from Hutter and B. Braun, which is the world’s 15th-largest medical device company according to MDO‘s Medtech Big 100 ranking by revenue.
“Our commitment to sustainability is part of everything we do,” Hutter said. “Across our portfolio of devices, we are focused on waste savings — our products provide fewer SKUs (stock-keeping units) and less waste compared to some of our peers. We strive to design our packaging using less plastic and with recyclable materials — while avoiding DEHP and PVC.”
B. Braun also has water conservation and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction initiatives, and is “well on our way” to hit its GHG targets across all of the company’s sites worldwide by 2030.
With regards to packaging, he said B. Braun has global design guidance for sustainability, founded on the established principles of the packaging design hierarchy and guidance issued by organizations such as Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC), Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), RecyClass, and the Circular Economy for Flexible Packaging (CEFLEX) initiative. Guidance from those groups can help other medical device manufactures launch or improve sustainability initiatives.
“The design process starts with prioritizing reduction first, followed by renewable materials (like paper), design for recyclability and the ability to incorporate recycled content in support of a circular economy,” Hutter said. “We are seeking ways to reduce the amount of plastic we use in packaging and choosing to use plastic packaging that is designed for recyclability while we seek opportunities to use recycled plastic content. Further, we recycle plastics from our device manufacturing processes as part of our zero waste to landfill practice across our U.S. production sites.”
Choosing recycled cardboard for packaging is an easy sustainability measure. [Photo by Mayatnikstudio via Stock.Adobe.com]
“Getting to this milestone has taken effort,” he said. “In North America and elsewhere in the world, the recycling infrastructure is complex and not uniform from region to region.”
The company prioritizes packaging made from readily recyclable materials such as those widely accepted in curbside consumer recycling, including paper fibers and plastics such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) and others.
“For example, polypropylene, the main material we use to construct our IV solution products, is the third-most recycled resin in curbside recycling,” he said.
B. Braun also uses recycled content in packaging when possible.
“For example, our corrugate shipping boxes for contain recycled paper fibers, as is common today, and we are collaborating with industry partners and organizations to enable the use of recycled plastics where safe and feasible,” he said.
