KPIs for Product Sustainability MedTech Edition

In MedTech, ‘single use’ has become a business model, not a safety feature.

Take insulin pens.
Elegant, life-saving, and everywhere.
But beneath the clinical efficiency lies an environmental profile that most companies don’t track, let alone redesign around.

Each pen contributes:
120 g CO₂e (Global Warming Potential)
0.6 kg 1,4-DCB-eq (Human Toxicity)
0.25 kg 1,4-DCB-eq (Freshwater Ecotoxicity)
0.05 MJ (Abiotic Resource Depletion)
0.6 L (Water Scarcity)

And there are hundreds of millions of them produced every year.
Nearly all end up incinerated or landfilled: unrecovered, unrefined, unaccounted for.

This isn’t just a materials issue. It’s design logic, IP strategy, user behavior and regulatory inertia all reinforcing a linear system.

📌So I made this:
A one-page cheat sheet with 8 sustainability KPIs tailored to insulin pens focused on the real friction points:

Product Lock-in Ratio. Refillability. Pharma Residue. Eco-Obsolescence Risk.

Not surface-level. Not aspirational. Just the metrics that expose what’s quietly stopping MedTech from being circular.
MedTech won’t shift until we measure the right things.

Sources:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gianlucamanago_medtech-activity-7340697208721141762-xq0l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAtGGkQBsxwMBmX3lEJO8btihnfBCaHqTz4