Publications

Waste within the medical sector is rampant and expensive. Our team was tasked with finding a way to move towards the ideal of the circular economy with regards to Johnson & Johnson's medical devices (both those that are currently on the market and those currently in the pipeline). Specifically, our sponsor expressed interest in finding ways to recapture valuable materials that are incorporated into single use surgical devices which are currently discarded after just one usage or procedure. Through this multi-phase project, our team engaged stakeholders across the medical, laboratory, and waste management sectors, and created several iterations of prototypes before creating our final solution: an ecosystem consisting of an automated sorting machine designed for the OR, an associated database structured to organize and distribute relevant materials data across stakeholder groups, and a proposed business solution outlining the relationships and interactions between these stakeholder groups. Click the green button to go to the publication, and the blue bin to go to the associate project page on this website.