Replacing fossil-based plastics in medical applications

Renewable and recycled drop-in solutions enable the production of more sustainable plastics for various applications, including sensitive medical ones.  

The vast majority of plastics - in medical applications and elsewhere - are made from fossil resources. As such, they are taking a toll on the environment, contributing to climate change by leading to fossil carbon being emitted into the atmosphere. 

Attempts to replace fossil resources in the manufacturing of plastics are mostly focussing on two alternative carbon sources: recycled carbon and renewable carbon. While the former utilises plastic waste and turns it into new plastic applications, the latter leverages biogenic carbon as the basis for plastics.  

Finnish company Neste is building upon its experience as a renewable fuel producer to provide renewable feedstock for plastics, while at the same time developing chemical recycling (sometimes also referred to as “advanced recycling”) technologies to provide recycled feedstock.  

Drop-in solutions: limited effort, maximum effect 

The idea behind both routes: provide a drop-in solution that can be used in the existing production infrastructure and to produce the same plastic applications that are today made from fossil resources. The benefit: little CAPEX requirements as no new infrastructure is required and no changes in the performance and quality of the products. What changes though is the carbon footprint of the product and the amount of waste generated that has no further use.  

“We believe the drop-in character to be a very important factor when it comes to accelerating the transition to more sustainable plastics,” explains Jeroen Verhoeven, vice president value chain development at Neste Renewable Polymers and Chemicals. “It reduces the hurdles for the industry to make the change - and it reduces limitations on the applications of more sustainable plastics. You can continue using the same products you used before - just without fossil resources.” 

Recently, in April 2023, Swedish MedTech company Wellspect HealthCare introduced bio-based materials into one of its products: a female urinary catheter with the name LoFric Elle. The original LoFric Elle catheter, launched in 2019, was manufactured solely from conventional fossil based raw material sources. Wellspect says that the carbon footprint of the plastic in its product has been cut by 55% compared to the original product. The company is using a mass balance approach to allocate the bio-based raw materials and to ascertain the same medical grade quality for the plastic. Wellspect credited suppliers LyondellBasell and Neste for making the switch possible.  

The catheter shows that the drop-in solutions can be used even in highly sensitive applications.  

Chemical recycling can enable recycled content in sensitive applications 

The renewable feedstock Neste produces is based on the company’s proprietary NEXBTL technology, which uses renewable oils and fats as input to produce fuels such as renewable diesel or sustainable aviation fuel and feedstock for polymers and chemicals. More than 90% of the raw materials used in the process are waste and residues such as used cooking oil or residues from vegetable oil processing. 3.3 million tonnes of such renewable products can be produced per year, a figure Neste intends to increase to 6.8 million tonnes by the end of 2026.  

On the chemical recycling front, the company aims at processing more than 1 million tonnes of waste plastic into high-quality feedstock for new polymers per year by 2030. The idea is to recycle plastic streams that are currently hard-to-recycle with conventional recycling technologies. The waste is first being liquefied, pre-treated and upgraded and then finally co-processed with crude oil in the company’s conventional refinery in Finnish Porvoo. In contrast to conventional mechanical recycling, the processes allow for a removal of impurities, producing virgin-quality feedstock for new plastics. First processing runs were successfully completed, processing some 3,000 tons of waste plastic. 

With renewable and recycled feedstocks, there might be a solution on the table that also the medical industry can build upon - to phase out fossil resources from its value chains.