Materials Science Toolkit for Carbon Footprint Assessment: A Case Study for Endoscopic Accessories of Common Use

Abstract

[EN] Ironically, healthcare systems are key agents in respiratory-related diseases and estimated deaths because of the high impact of their greenhouse gas emissions, along with industry, transportation, and housing. Based on safety requirements, hospitals and related services use an extensive number of consumables, most of which end up incinerated at the end of their life cycle. A thorough assessment of the carbon footprint of such devices typically requires knowing precise information about the manufacturing process, rarely available in detail because of the many materials, pieces and steps involved during the fabrication. And yet, tools most often used for determining the environmental impact of consumer goods just require a bunch of parameters, mainly based on the material composition of the device. Here we report a basic set of analytical methods that provide the information required by the software OpenLCA to calculate the main outcome related to environmental impact, the greenhouse gas emissions. Through thermogravimetry, calorimetry, infrared spectroscopy and elemental analysis we proved that obtaining relevant data for the calculator in the exemplifying case of endoscopy tooling or accessories is possible. This routine procedure opens the door to a broader, more accurate analysis of the environmental impact of everyday work at hospital services, offering potential alternatives to minimize it.