Supply Chain Drives 71% of Health Sector's Carbon Footprint: AMID

AMID argues that 71% of the health sector's carbon footprint originates in manufacturing, distribution, and packaging processes. The association calls on industry players, hospitals, and regulators to build sustainability into daily operations without compromising patient safety, product quality, or regulatory compliance.  

The Mexican Association of Innovative Medical Device Industries (AMID) reports that 71% of the health sector's carbon footprint is generated before a medical device reaches the patient. The figure encompasses manufacturing, distribution, packaging, and post-use handling processes, and reframes the sustainability debate in healthcare. AMID seeks to expand the medical industry's green agenda toward areas that typically remain out of focus, such as logistics, industrial inputs, and non-clinical waste. 

Mexico ranks first in medical device exports in Latin America and fifth worldwide. The industry sustains a global-scale production chain, with manufacturing plants, distribution networks, and hospital operations that generate tons of materials, packaging, wastewater, and logistical waste each year.

The environmental impact debate in healthcare has tended to focus on hazardous clinical waste, syringes, gloves, and contaminated material, leaving industrial and logistical processes largely unexamined. AMID argues that this analytical gap understates the true scale of the problem.

For an industry operating under strict traceability, sterility, and regulatory compliance standards, integrating sustainability criteria without compromising product quality represents a first-order technical and operational challenge. 

What Companies in the Sector Are Doing

AMID identified practices that member companies already implement to reduce their environmental footprint in daily operations. None of them, the association notes, require abandoning the safety standards that medical care demands.

One area is efficient water use. At production facilities, some companies have installed systems to reuse water or steam within their industrial processes. In services requiring high-purity water, such as renal care, technologies exist that produce the resource according to treatment demand, reducing total volume used without altering the clinical conditions of the procedure.

A second area is the recovery of non-clinical materials. AMID member companies have implemented programs to separate, condition, and redirect packaging, pallets, plastics, and other inputs used in logistical or hospital processes. Where conditions allow, these materials are reincorporated into new uses or converted into raw materials for other products.

The distinction between clinical and non-clinical materials is, in this context, a central operational criterion. According to the World Health Organization, about 85% of waste generated by healthcare activities is non-hazardous and can be managed as general waste when properly separated. That differentiation expands the sector's margin for action without exposing patient safety.  

"We all want hospitals that heal people, but we also need them to operate responsibly toward the environment. Innovation in medical devices is not only in the technology that reaches the patient. It is also in the way we as a sector improve processes, manage materials, and collaborate to reduce impacts without compromising the quality or safety of care," says Ana Riquelme, Executive Director, AMID.

Riquelme says scaling this agenda requires collaboration among industry players, hospitals, regulators, healthcare personnel, and end users, along with clear rules and incentives that make integrating sustainability into the sector's daily operations viable, measurable, and sustained over time.

The comments were made during a meeting held in observance of World Environment Month.  "World Environment Month is an opportunity to broaden the conversation about the health sector's role in the sustainability agenda. At AMID, we are convinced that innovation is the path forward, because it allows us to rethink the processes that sustain medical care without abandoning the standards that protect patients. Taking on that commitment means recognizing that health and sustainability are not separate agendas," Riquelme says. 

The Future is Safety

AMID says that any environmental progress in medical devices must preserve patient safety, as well as the quality, sterility, performance, traceability, and regulatory compliance of the technologies involved. The next step, according to the association, involves building regulatory frameworks and incentives that allow sector companies to integrate sustainable practices without absorbing disproportionate costs or compromising their quality obligations. The economic viability of these practices is, in that sense, a necessary condition for adoption at scale. 

For healthcare stakeholders — manufacturers, distributors, private hospitals, and medical supply network operators — AMID's position carries concrete implications. Medical device supply chains operate under long-term contracts with price, quality, and delivery time criteria. Incorporating sustainability metrics into those contracts requires agreements between buyers and suppliers, as well as measurement systems that are not yet standardized across the sector.

In an environment where environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria carry increasing weight in institutional purchasing decisions and access to international financing, the ability of Mexican medical device companies to demonstrate sustainability progress may become a competitive differentiator. Mexico, as a key exporter in the sector, has additional incentives to develop that capacity before it becomes a market-access requirement.