internship: transitioning to renewable plastics in medical disposables

Will you help us investigate what alternative solution is most feasible and has greatest environmental impact?

Internship: transitioning to renewable plastics in medical disposables

About Demcon

Demcon management & support is a developer and producer of technology and innovative products that contribute to solutions for technical and social problems.

Your assignment

You will investigate how Demcon can reduce the environmental impact of products containing plastic parts within the medical industry.

Over the past decennia, the medical industry has been moving from reusable equipment to disposable equipment, often made of or containing plastics. Reasons for this include the low cost of raw material for plastics, the easily obtainable sterility of plastic products, and globalisation, which makes reusable sterile products more difficult to track, collect, and reuse. Producing low-cost plastic products and selling them with high throughput has become more financially attractive.

Changing the current disposable system can be very challenging due to financial disadvantage, regulations, or lack of incentive. A more accessible intermediate solution may offer a way to move toward a sustainable system while keeping the current workflow largely intact.

One possible approach is to move away from virgin fossil-based plastics toward more sustainable alternatives, such as plastics made from renewable resources or recycled plastics. This introduces new challenges, including bio-based material characteristics, material degradation over the product lifetime, material purity, and increased production cost.

Your growth, our pride!

DEMCON offers a dynamic, growing and innovative organization. With our complex projects and multidisciplinary teams we offer you a lot of challenges and variety in this position. Thanks to enthusiastic and dedicated colleagues, our working atmosphere is good, open and informal, with a flat organizational structure.

You will have a regular supervisor to coach you, and all mutual wishes and expectations are clearly agreed upon before the start of the assignment. Furthermore, Demcon gives you the opportunity to work in a motivating atmosphere, with colleagues with a lot of experience in the development of medical devices. You can get a good impression of what it is like to be part of the world of DEMCON. And that can be a very good start to your career.