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PODCAST

MedTech Sustainability by Design

Lucas Pianegonda

MedTech Sustainability by Design is the podcast where the world"s leading experts in medical device, sustainable plastics, eco-design, and regulatory compliance share their expertise. Each episode cuts through the complexity of plastic selection, regulatory changes, medical device engineering or sustainable plastics — so MedTech engineers and start-up teams can build devices that are good for the patient, good for the planet and profitable.Your host, Lucas Pianegonda, is a globally recognized expert

science life sciences

All Episodes

48:01

EmpCo, Green-Claims and the ACT Label with James...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/09/30

From September 2026, the EU stops accepting green claims that nobody has verified. Self-certified labels are banned. Fines run up to 4% of annual revenue. I talked to James Connelly, CEO of My Green Lab, the non-profit behind the ACT Ecolabel, the first third-party verified eco-label for laboratory products. Over 5,300 labs in 62 countries have engaged with My Green Lab certification, including 42 of the 50 largest biotech and pharma companies. In this episode: - How the ACT 2.0 label's 100-p...

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47:53

Win Tenders With Sustainability (Joachim Almdal, Care...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/08/26

European hospitals are already scoring sustainability in tenders. Joachim Almdal from Care Pathway Consulting explains why the device is only 10 to 15% of the emissions across a care pathway, and why that changes what you optimise and who you have to convince. In this episode: - What a care pathway is, and why looking at the device alone moves the problem around instead of solving it - Why European healthcare providers cannot hit their 2035 and 2045 targets without pushing requirements on...

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57:10

Microextrusion: Better Catheters With Less Waste with...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/08/12

Why are most catheters still glued and heat-shrunk together by hand? Simone Maccagnan from Gimac International makes the case for microextrusion: single continuous parts, controlled molecular weight and crystallinity, and dynamic extrusion that changes stiffness along one tube. In this episode: - How microextrusion replaces multi-part catheter assemblies, and why that matters for validation, scrap and patient safety - What dynamic extrusion is, and where the physics gets hard - How inline...

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56:11

Sustainable Catheter Case-Study with Damian Carr

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/07/29

What is the most sustainable catheter we could design from scratch today? Damian Carr, founder of Eyedea MedTech Education and author of the Catheter R&D Handbook, joins me for a full case study. We break down how catheters are built today, why the process is still manual and fluoropolymer-heavy, and what a modern reel-to-reel line would look like. We cover PFAS-free liners, UHMWPE, dynamic co-extrusion, same-polymer designs that can be recycled, and the cost reality: 20 to 25% of today's...

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56:18

How to Save 4.5 kg of CO2 per kg of Plastic | Tim...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/07/08

Can bio-based plastic move past the nice story and scale in regulated MedTech? Tim Wagler is Commercial Director EMEA for Braskem's I'm green bio-based portfolio, polyethylene made from sugarcane instead of fossil feedstock. Braskem just launched an I'm green bio-based medical grade. In this episode: - What "physical content" bio-based means and how it differs from mass balance - Why fossil prices are spiking and bio-based is no longer the expensive option - The supply and land-use question...

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56:23

Corporate Sustainability Made Easy with Matthew...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/06/17

How does a company with 120,000 colleagues and 500,000 products put a number on its carbon footprint and actually act on it? Matthew Yamatin is Global Director Sustainability at Thermo Fisher Scientific. He built the corporate sustainability program from scratch after joining in 2022 and now runs it across eight business groups. In this episode: - The scalable method Thermo Fisher uses to calculate product carbon footprints across half a million products - Why mass balance is the only realist...

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56:21

Don't Do Ego-Design | Bart Verleije, Voxdale

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/06/03

"Do not do ego-design." A professor told Bart Verleije that in school, and it shaped how he has built medical devices ever since. Bart is Commercial Director at Voxdale, a Belgian design and engineering firm, with more than 1,400 projects over 19 years. He explains how a napkin sketch becomes a certified, manufacturable device, and where most MedTech projects go wrong before they reach a patient. In this episode: - His BURST framework: Business, User, Regulatory, Sustainability, Technology - ...

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51:57

The Sustainable Plastic That's Actually CHEAPER Than...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/05/20

Most sustainable plastics cost two to six times more than oil-based alternatives. That's why you don't see them everywhere. Alex Braun decided to fix that. Alex is the Chairman of Pillar Ltd, an Israeli industrial R&D company with 26 years of experience building materials for the world's largest manufacturers. Out of that work came three startups: PlasticBack, which chemically recycles PVC at under 100 degrees Celsius. Snow Polymers, which makes bio-based plastic at oil prices without req...

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45:26

The Autoinjector Redesigned: Less Plastic, Lower...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/05/06

Over a billion autoinjectors are used every year. Almost all of them are single-use. Almost all of that plastic gets incinerated. John Palmer-Felgate spent 30 years designing medical devices. At some point, he decided to actually fix the problem. John is the Founder and CTO of Eco-Inject, a UK startup that has built a sustainable autoinjector from the ground up using 100% bio-based polymers, fewer components, and a completely rethought internal architecture. Here's what we get into: Why you c...

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45:27

CAPA Done Right: How to Turn Quality Firefighting...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/04/22

A lot of MedTech companies treat CAPA as a compliance exercise. They open a record, close a record, and survive the audit. Georg Digel has spent his career watching what happens when that's the only goal… and it's not pretty. Georg is the Founder and Owner of Elevate CAPA. He has spent years helping MedTech companies build CAPA systems that actually work: ones that identify real problems, trace them to their root cause, and prevent them from coming back. Here's what we get into: Why CAPA is o...

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41:26

Remanufacturing Single-Use Medical Devices with...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/04/15

This episode is brought to you by Vanguard, a company specializing in remanufacturing single-use medical devices to as-good-as-new condition. A device labeled "single-use" gets thrown away after one patient. That makes sense for a syringe. It makes a lot less sense for a cardiac catheter that costs thousands of euros. Ulrike Marczak is the CEO of Vanguard, a company that has been remanufacturing complex single-use medical devices for 30 years. They take used devices from hospitals, fully refu...

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45:18

The Bio-Based Pipette at comparable costs to...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/04/08

Bastien Manuel recognized that sustainability was inevitable for most medical plastic manufacturers. At elmplastic, he proactively established his business with that future in mind. He's Commercial Director at elm-plastic GmbH, a Germany-based, family-owned converter of plastic and manufacturer of pharmaceutical plastic devices. In 2025, they launched what they believe is the only commercially available bio-based plastic oral dosing device on the market: a sustainable pharmaceutical pip...

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49:26

How Advisory Boards Can Help You Make Strategically...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/04/01

This episode is brought to you by Synera Advisory. Most MedTech founders treat FDA clearance like it's the finish line. Jordan Morrison has an entire bookshelf of cleared devices that can't sell to prove it isn't. She's Founding Partner at Synera Advisory, a physician-backed advisory group supporting founders from concept through commercialization. In this episode, she explains why so many MedTech startups run out of road after clearance, and what to do instead. Here's what we get into: Why F...

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45:52

Recycling is Just an Extension of Linearity with...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/03/25

This episode is brought to you by FKuR Kunststoff GmbH, a leading producer and distributor of bio-based and compostable plastics. "Recycling is just an extension of linearity." Patrick Zimmermann posts the same sentence on LinkedIn, and it always gets a reaction: He's the Managing Director at FKuR Kunststoff GmbH, a company that's been working with bio-based and compostable plastics for decades. So when he says recycling doesn't close the loop, he's not being cynical. He's being precise...

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46:34

How to Build a Medical Device That Actually Sells...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/03/18

If you want to make your medical devices more sustainable, let's talk—: https://calendly.com/lucas-pianegonda-gradical/discovery-call-gradical Most MedTech founders build the wrong device because they skip the steps that actually matter before the engineering starts. Lisa Voronkova is CEO of OVA Solutions, an R&D shop that has developed over 200 medical devices from scratch, and author of Hardware Bible. In this episode, she breaks down exactly where founders go wrong, what the developmen...

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44:39

How AI Can 10x Medical Device Development with Prof....

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/03/11

If you want to make your medical devices more sustainable, let's talk: https://calendly.com/lucas-pianegonda-gradical/discovery-call-gradical What if you could cut the time it takes to develop a medical device in half? In this episode, I sit down with Prof. Dr. Christian Johner, founder of the Johner Institute and one of Europe's most recognized experts in medical device, regulatory affairs and software. He has spent decades helping manufacturers navigate complex regulatory hurdles, and recen...

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53:40

Why Sustainability and Compliance Are Becoming the...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/03/05

If you're a MedTech company struggling to make your devices more sustainable, let’s talk—BOOK A CALL HERE: https://calendly.com/lucas-pianegonda-gradical/discovery-call-gradical What if the plastic in your current medical device ends up restricted before your product reaches the end of life? Julian Lotz, CEO and Co-Founder of BIOVOX, joins the podcast to talk about where material compliance is heading and what to do about it now. His argument is straightforward: patient protection and environ...

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41:50

The Real Cost of Medical Waste (And Why Hospitals Are...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/02/11

This episode is sponsored by Sterilis Solutions: https://sterilissolutions.com "How much is medical waste actually costing us?" is one of the questions hospitals are finally asking out loud. The problem is, most facilities don't realize they're dealing with a 10-20% annual cost increase—plus safety risks and sustainability pressure that isn't going away. In this episode, I speak with Andy Marshall, CEO of Sterilis Solutions, about how onsite sterilization changes the equation for hospitals, w...

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59:40

How Do You Know Your Medical Device Material Will...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/01/28

"Is this material going to be biocompatible?" is one of the most commonly asked questions in medical device development. The problem is, there's no such thing as a biocompatible material. In this episode, I speak with Marina Daineko, Biocompatibility Consultant at Intrinsic Medical Group, about how biological risk assessment actually works, what mistakes companies make early in development, and how to incorporate biocompatibility thinking during prototyping without running full testing on eve...

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53:23

Can Chemical Recycling Solve MedTech's Sustainability...

MedTech Sustainability by Design ·

2026/01/21

Chemical recycling is often presented as a silver bullet. But is it actually viable for medical-grade plastics? In this episode, I speak with Reinier Grimbergen, CTO of Blue Circle Olefins, about what chemical recycling really is, how it differs from mechanical recycling, and where it actually makes sense for MedTech. This conversation is technical, practical, and grounded in industrial reality. We talk about pyrolysis vs gasification, energy trade-offs, feedstock constraints, economics, and ...

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51 results

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