CHaMP: Circularity in Healthcare Materials Provision

CHaMP (Circularity in Healthcare Materials Provision) is a collaboration between Bupa Ltd. and the University of Manchester (UoM). This 3-year project explores circular pathways for the diverse materials enabling healthcare provision, using interdisciplinary methods to unpick opportunities, barriers and unintended consequences for reuse, mechanical recycling and depolymerisation in health clinics, dental practices, and care homes. The project explores material selection, social practice, product segregation, sterilization and quantified sustainability to create actionable circular solutions across Bupa’s 380 dental practices, 80 health clinics, 130 care homes and the Cromwell Hospital. The project builds from an emerging research partnership between the two organisations specifically in efforts to improve the sustainability of healthcare. The proposal has been co-created to both maximise potential impact and explore the fundamental challenges in circularising healthcare materials. Integrating assessments of social practice and life cycle impacts of proposed fates optimises systemic sustainability. This new way of assessing the intersections between economic efficiency, climate change, material selection and waste management is to be explored in the medical sector for the first time, building on strong motivation in the sector for sustainable change. While the scale and harm of material consumption in the healthcare sector has been defined, the consequences of reduced consumption, reuse models and alternative materials is hidden. This partnership will explore the fundamental engineering and material science questions that will enable authentic reduction in environmental footprints in material provision in healthcare settings. Changes in material selection and segregation, for both reuse and recycling, in clinical settings where alignment with patient outcomes and logistical limitations are paramount, are challenging and require fundamental research to understand and overcome. But there is no panacea: potential fates of reuse, mechanical recycling and chemical depolymerisation must be incorporated together into sustainable systems. The quantification of sustainability impacts – and the comparison of relative impacts across embodied carbon, use case scenarios, and end-of-life fates – is essential to deliver sustainable solutions. The project sits at an important nexus point between strategic areas of research. These are opportunities to not just reshape circularity for Bupa but to provide a game-changing shift in healthcare provision. Further added value emerges on the academic side of the partnership, building a critical mass of interdisciplinary researchers able to articulate the complexity of sustainable material transitions and transfer that knowledge into a global industry leader. Within the EPSRC's Net Zero landscape, Manufacturing and the Circular Economy is a key enabler to a carbon-neutral future and this sector-focussed approach will showcase how to enable industry to both make internal changes while also providing avenues for environmental stewardship and sector-wide leadership. The overall objectives of the research programme are to: Develop a deep understanding of the interconnectedness between social practice and material provision, defining segregation opportunities for reuse and recycling that maintain clinical outcomes. Understand the relationship between material selection and reuse breakeven points in healthcare settings, improving the sustainability of reuse through minimising the footprint of sterilization and designing lower footprint materials. Establish high volume clinical waste streams to create value in mechanical recycling and chemical depolymerization and identify the pre-treatment steps required. Quantify the environmental impacts of proposed fates to optimise system sustainability and develop materials hierarchies for the material flows in the provision of healthcare. We are applying through Route 1 of the Prosperity Partnerships Programme.