If you are in healthcare or diabetic, you would appreciate a rethinking of syringes.
According to this Technology Review article:
Green products are everywhere, from water bottles that use less plastic to energy-efficient buildings to jackets made from recycled materials. But one sector that green principles have yet to infiltrate is health care; manufacturers of medical products are focused on safety rather than sustainability. Serge Roux, an industrial designer with the technology design firm Cambridge Consultants, says that those two goals need not be mutually exclusive.
Roux has created a syringe, called the Syreen ("syringe" plus "green"), that maintains the safety features of traditional syringes but might also help reduce waste. "I started the project purely with ecodesign as motivation," he says, "but as we went along, we found it added a lot of other benefits."
The major the design innovation in Syreen is that the syringe itself doubles as protective packaging. In one version of Syreen made from recyclable plastic, an interlocking stack of four syringes is 50 percent smaller by volume and 30 percent less by weight than the conventional product, which is packaged in a cardboard box. A second version now in the works, which is made of glass, is slightly larger than the plastic one but still packs up significantly smaller than traditional versions. That reduces the price of shipping as well as the environmental footprint and the amount of space needed to store the product. (The plastic design uses a polymer that is more expensive than glass, so it's unclear how much those syringes would cost compared with traditional ones. Cambridge Consultants predicts that the glass version will be the same price as current syringes or less…
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