This week, project board members Albert Wagelmans, Professor of Management Science at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Nicole Hunfeld, Principal Investigator of ESCH-R, spoke with Arthur Haag, Sector Manager Cure, Care & Education at PreZero, one of ESCH-R’s consortium partners.

Now almost two years into the project, ESCH-R is continuously looking for ways to increase its impact. That means regularly checking in with the companies that are part of the consortium: understanding how the collaboration has been working for them and where there are opportunities to strengthen it further. It’s this ongoing dialogue with our partners that helps ESCH-R sharpen its direction and stay closely connected to what happens in practice.

Asked what he is most proud of, Arthur highlighted that PreZero gets to be part of this kind of collaboration in the first place, connecting with the entire value chain in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible: through ESCH-R, PreZero is able to connect to every partner in the healthcare chain, from material manufacturers and suppliers to hospitals, healthcare professionals and researchers; rather than only with organisations it would normally interact with.

A recurring theme of the meeting was the ambition of the Green Deal targets. According to the Green Deal Duurzame Zorg 3.0, by 2030 a maximum of 25% of healthcare waste may remain unsorted residual waste. In practice, this means that around 75% of healthcare waste needs to be separated for recycling or other forms of recovery. Achieving this requires action across the entire value chain.

Reaching that 75% means that every part of the value chain has a role to play: progress requires action at every stage. It starts with companies at the very beginning of the chain, such as medical materials manufacturer Wittenburg and it also depends on hospitals themselves procuring more circularly, choosing to buy products that are easier to separate and recycle instead of ones that are not. Every link in the value chain, from manufacturers to waste processors like PreZero, has its own responsibility. Progress towards the 75% target depends on all of them working together.

Meet the Experts-day

The upcoming Meet the Experts-day was also discussed. The idea is to bring work package leads, researchers and companies together and to build the day around concrete cases (such as the TAVI case). To make this possible, every part of the value chain will be invited, ensuring that knowledge and perspectives from across the chain come together around the same table.