European Project Cuts Environmental Impact of Medical Electronics by Up to 65%

As electronic devices become more embedded in daily life, the raw materials and energy needed to produce them keep rising. The European Union's Green Deal aims for Europe to become climate-neutral by 2050, which requires considering sustainability throughout a product's development, not only at the end of its life. The SUSTRONICS project, involving partners from 11 European countries, is developing technologies and methods to make electronics more sustainable across their full life cycle, focusing on resource-efficient materials, printed electronics, energy-efficient manufacturing, and reuse and recycling.

Researchers led by David Sanchez at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM) in Germany carried out life-cycle assessments on 10 demonstrator devices in the project, including EEG diagnostic systems, smart wound dressings and wearable sensors, analyzing each product from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use and disposal to identify which processes cause the most environmental harm.

For a glucose-monitoring patch, the assessments found that electrodes were almost single-handedly responsible for the product's environmental impact. Acting on that finding, project partner Onalabs implemented an optical sensor instead, cutting the patch's overall carbon footprint by around 65%.

For smart wound dressings, the researchers found that changing the substrate and conductive ink -- replacing silver with materials such as Thinstar and carbon, and incorporating recycled materials -- reduced the environmental impact of the flexible electronic modules by up to 95%, compared with the standard combination of PET plastic and silver, while producing signals comparable to that standard. Fraunhofer IZM said the assessments give its development partners the data needed to swap materials or adjust manufacturing before a product moves into its next development phase, rather than only after it reaches the market.