In the medical sector today, a great deal of metal and glass are still used. Both these materials have the disadvantage that they are heavy and expensive to manufacture. Glass also represents a safety risk of breakage in many areas. For this reason, many medical applications, such as injection syringes, tubes, bags and containers, are already made of polymer materials. However, these are all disposable articles, which require expensive and environmentally problematic disposal as hazard waste after only one use.
The reason for this is that in contrast to glass and metal, conventional plastics cannot be sterilised using most common methods – a prerequisite for repeated use of medical equipment. Based on this, the amount of hazard waste from medical equipment generated by strong growth in this sector, is becoming an increasing problem.
To solve this problem, EMS has now for the first time, developed a completely new kind of transparent polymer, which can be sterilised several hundred times. This development, including scaling-up to industrial size production plants took only 2 years. Whereby EMS benefitted from many years' know-how in the development in the field of high-performance transparent materials and has gained a future leading edge over competitors.
With this new material, EMS has also opened up the way for replacement of glass and metal in the medical sector – a well-known strength of EMS. Previous disposable articles can now be sterilised more than 500 times in future and reused. This allows corresponding health costs to be reduced by more than 90%. Thanks to the low density of the EMS specialty polymer, part weight can also be reduced by up to 80%. These are enormous additional advantages along with a reduction in the quantity of hazardous waste.
EMS has already received first customer approvals and certification which are necessary for use of these material in the medical sector. In this way, the road is free for cost-reducing, resource-saving and environmentally compatible medical articles made of sterilisable EMS polymer materials – because EMS stands for reusable instead of disposable!
