CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN HEALTHCARE AND ENGINEERING: BUSINESS, LEGAL, AND SCIENTIFIC PATHWAYS TO SUSTAINABILITY

Povzetek

This research examines the application of circular economy (CE) principles within the medical and engineering sectors, focusing on business, legal, and scientific perspectives on sustainability. The approach adopted in the research is exploratory and descriptive, utilizing secondary data from academic articles, industry reports, legal frameworks, and case studies. In healthcare, circular practices such as equipment refurbishment, green procurement, and reusable consumables demonstrated a possible waste reduction of 20 to 30 percent and average annual savings of USD 250,000 per hospital. In the engineering sector, industrial symbiosis, modular construction, and waste recycling resulted in material savings of 20–30 percent and generated new revenue streams of up to USD 600,000 annually. Laws and regulations, waste management, and ISO standards were crucial for ensuring compliance and safe implementation of CE practices, achieving an adoption rate of approximately 5575% across various sectors. Facilitators (such as compostable materials, 3D-manufactured healthcare products, supply monitoring via the IoT, enhanced recycling methods) boosted efficiency and scalability. Cross-sector analysis highlighted transferable best practices, while issues like patient safety in healthcare and process scalability in engineering were discovered to be specific to their sectors. The results show that the sustainable implementation of the circular economy requires extensive business strategies and supporting legal structures as well as technological innovations, in line with being able to clearly record their resulting environmental, economic, and operational impacts.