Eco-Dialysis: a bottom-up design approach for preliminary analysis towards sustainability in medical packaging.

This research arose from the recognition of a problem that involves the fields of design and biomedicine: the medical wastes of one of the most expensive, life saving treatments all over the world: hemodialysis. The awareness of their environmental and economical impacts drove the researcher of the SS Nephrology of San Luigi University Hospital (Orbassano - Turin, Italy) to meet the Ecodesign team of Politecnico di Torino (Turin, Italy), to face a spontaneous and innovative research. Chronic Haemodialysis implies “washing” blood via a biomedical device on the average three times per week: it is one of the most expensive medical treatments in terms of water and energy consumption and wastes production. Dialysis exerts a high environmental impact, because of the need of a huge quantity of disposables, resulting in a great amount of waste products for each treatment. The Ecodesign team has developed, since 2005, a new methodology to analyse the environmental sustainability of packaging and devices, based on the disassembly of the components, in order to identify the critical issues from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. Nephrology and design researchers joined together to analyse all devices and packaging used in different haemodialysis treatments, so as to define criticalities and potentials for re-designing packaging and devices. Starting from these results, we will look for a client to carry out the project and propose a new line of eco-packaging and devices that would meet environmental, economical and functional requirements of haemodialysis.