Guest: Lucas R. Pianegonda, Founder, Managing Director & Lead Plastic Expert, Gradical GmbH Host: Joachim Almdal Recorded: June 2026

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Joachim: Hello, and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. My name is Joachim Almdal, and I’ve got an exciting episode for you today. We’re talking today to Lucas Pianegonda. I might have got that wrong.

Lucas: Perfect.

Joachim: Welcome on the show, Lucas.

Lucas: Yeah, thank you very much for having me.

Joachim: My pleasure. I think you put out a lot of good work. So Lucas, you have a background as a material analyst and an expert on materials in general. And you’re also the founder of Gradical GmbH, where you help medtech companies take better decisions on which materials to use in their products. What got you excited about this path?

Lucas: I always was, I’d say, very tech savvy. I think when I was seven, I told my parents that I’m gonna be an engineer. And then they said, “Okay, you need to go to a university then.” And I was like, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do that.” I was always very excited about chemistry and physics, and I wanted to do something that has practical value. So I decided to study material science, then went into the plastic industry. Went to a manufacturer / injection molder, and the rest is history. It’s like quicksand: medtech, you’ll get stuck there. So yeah, this is how I went to where I am now.

Joachim: That’s great. And I love that you just had this vision as a seven-year-old. I don’t know, maybe I wanted to be a fireman or something. I can’t even remember. But you were on track.

Lucas: And to be very specific, I told my parents that I’m gonna be an inventor one day, and then they told me, “But there’s no such thing as an inventor. You’re gonna be an engineer.” And I’d be like, “Okay, then it’s engineering then.” And funnily enough, with my master thesis in material science, I got a patent, so I got the inventor checkmark out of the way.

Joachim: That’s amazing. And you’re based in Switzerland?

Lucas: Correct. I’m in Switzerland.

Joachim: Very good. In the beautiful Alps. Great place to live and a great place to work with medtech and pharma. So Lucas, take us into it. When a medtech company reaches out to you, what’s usually the background of their pains? Are they seeing pressure from the healthcare providers, their customers around devices, or is it their own corporate sustainability strategy? Why do they call you?

Lucas: Okay, so I can tell you my typical call, and then I’ll elaborate a little bit on the forces driving sustainability, because I have a whole theory about it. My typical project is this device manufacturer, usually a medical device manufacturer, comes to me and says, “I have this device on the market, and now I want to develop the next generation of my device, and it should have more usability, better clinical outcomes, bells and whistles or whatnot. And now it needs to be sustainable, and we have actually no clue what that actually means. So Lucas, please tell us which material is better, and where do we even get this material?” So that’s my usual typical project. I do everything from done-for-you consulting on material selection, to training and coaching to get this knowledge and this expertise into the companies.

And what drives this: I think there are four fundamental forces that drive sustainability in medtech, and I think overall. The first one is investor pressure, and investor pressure drives self-commitment, so SBTi commitments, for example. What we see there is that, if you just take medical devices, 49 of the 100 biggest medtech companies are SBTi committed, and this is more than 60% of the market by turnover. I don’t know if you did that analysis for pharma, but it’s probably looking even more severe there. So a lot of the big medtech companies are committed to SBTi. That’s the first driver.

The second driver is, of course, as you mentioned, customer pressure. And what we find there is that healthcare professionals think about sustainability differently than we do in the corporate environment. In corporate it’s more about the CO2 reduction, the LCA, the environmental footprint, scope one, two, three. And in the hospital, usually they think about waste, because waste is what they can see, what they can touch, what they can feel, and what hurts them. So that is number two, the customer pressure.

And then, if the customer pressure is there, someone will make a medical device that is more sustainable, with the bioplastic that is recyclable or a take-back system. And then what happens is you get FOMO, you get fear of missing out. So someone has something on the market, and what the competitors will do is, “Oh, I need something too.” I have a very cool example from the Pharmapack in this January. There was a UK startup that launched a sustainable auto-injector and they held their little five-minute talk on the stage. And then just right after the talk, their booth was swarmed with, I think it was like 50 people, and I would say 80% of them were competitors. So it was pretty funny to see. All the competitors were trying to figure out how they do it and how they can do this too.

And I think the last one, and this is what we talk mostly about, but it’s not the single driver, is regulations. In Europe we have the European Green Deal, and although we have the omnibus simplifications, it’s gonna be the same direction. We’re just gonna get there a little slower. So those are, I think, the four reasons why medtech is pushed towards this, and this is why I also think it’s inevitable that we’ll have to do it eventually. But yeah, rant over.

Joachim: No, that’s great. By and large, I definitely agree with those drivers. And it’s interesting to see the difference between medtech and pharma. Pharma is further ahead on the corporate-level reporting and so on. All top 20 are signed up to SBTi. But there’s much more commercial pressure on medtech. There are many more tenders, especially in Europe, in the UK, where it’s actually in the tenders, and you will be awarded points or be allowed to participate, or not. I didn’t go to Pharmapack, but I talked to a lot of people going there. So what are the challenges that they usually struggle with, in the device development department? We are not materials experts like yourselves. When we have worked with device development departments, it’s more been on how they organise themselves structurally around sustainability. And what I always loved about these people: you just have these super smart, friendly people who are niche experts on barrier properties and polymers, deep dives on very specific topics. So what are they usually struggling with? Why is it difficult for them to do more sustainable products?

Lucas: Let’s try to tie this together, because you said pharma’s a little more ahead on the corporate sustainability side than medtech, and I think there’s a good reason for it. Pharma is much more centralised. They’re much more consolidated. They’re big corporates, but there’s not as many SME companies, which in medtech we have a lot of. With these small and medium manufacturers, what we see is that they may have a development R&D department in total that is 5, 10, 15 people. If you have below 20 people, there is not much room for specialisation. So what happens is you have a mechanical engineer who is a project manager, and he’s taking care of everything. You’ll have a contract manufacturer who does the molds, the manufacturing, maybe also packaging and sterilisation. But the project manager will design the device. He will take care of the mold procurement. He will take care of the material selection, some of the regulatory work, some of the documentation. Of course you’ll have quality and regulatory, but they wear many hats, and they don’t have the capacity and the time to dig deep on material selection, sustainable plastics, material compliance, and to keep up with all the Green Deal regulations.

I know sustainability managers who can’t keep up with the amount of lawyer sentences that Brussels puts out. It’s very difficult to keep up with all of this. So I think they struggle with building knowledge because they don’t have the time to specialise. And what we bring in is our laser focus on this super niche, sustainable plastics in medical technology. We help them build this expertise. We fast-track them on how to do material selection, what the regulatory requirements are in plain English, not in lawyer English, and then what plastics are out there, and how to even compare them. Base skills like performing an LCA. And I think this is the biggest challenge for most medtech companies organisationally.

And I think there are two other challenges. One of them is the economics: sustainable plastics currently are more expensive, and you have to justify a business case and say, “Okay, I’ll make my device 5, 10% more expensive in manufacturing.” Who’s gonna eat that cost? That’s a challenge. And then another challenge is the speed to market. Medtech is so documentation-heavy. We tend to use a lot of our time in meetings and in alignment. The speed to market is very slow, not only due to the documentation, but also due to culture. And this is also where someone like you could come in and say, “How do we organise this in order to enable people to make faster decisions and get this thing to market?” Because what you see a lot is people who are scared of taking decisions, because it could fall on their feet, and “I don’t wanna get fired, so I don’t take any decisions.” So I would say it’s this: the expertise, then speed to market, and then the economics of the plastics.

Joachim: So let’s say hypothetically, I’m a medtech company. I’m looking to develop the next generation of a particular device. It doesn’t really matter the device. What are the key things to get right, and the key things to avoid, in making that product, in order to hit that sweet spot where we have a more sustainable product, emits less resources or emissions, sorry, but also doesn’t become so expensive that the business case doesn’t hold together and it will never get sold? So what are the key things to focus on, and the key things to avoid?

Lucas: I would say the key things to focus on is the trinity of design. So material selection, processing, and design. They have to work together to make your device work. The best outcomes are when you have all three improved. If you’re using a more sustainable plastic, which might cost you a little more…

Joachim: What is a more sustainable plastic, and what is good material selection in general?

Lucas: What you would try to do, number one, is you would have to have a structured material selection process. Number one: you start with the requirements that you have, and really challenge those requirements. So go ahead and say, “Okay, everything needs to be medical grade.” That’s a good example. And it’s like, “Okay, why? Why do we need the medical grade?” Sometimes you just have patient contact, and the risk of not having a medical grade is too high, so we decide that this part, from a risk-assessment point of view, needs a medical grade in order to ensure that this device is safe. But there are parts of the device that don’t need to be medical grade. For example, the housing of an electrical device doesn’t really need the medical grade and the change control and the supply security and all of that stuff.

So you get the requirements, you challenge them, and see that you get them down to a minimum, because over-requirement is actually the biggest source of higher cost and environmental footprint. It’s like, “I say it has to do everything,” so then you end up with a high-performance plastic that is more expensive and more environmentally taxing. Then you go search for alternatives, then you need to know what’s on the market, and then you need to know how to check these alternatives against the requirements that you laid out, and this is called the value analysis. If you do a value analysis right, you’ll get the rank-ordered list which describes which grade is the best and which grade is the worst, and then you take the top of the pyramid, and this is what you would send for sampling. So that’s an example of a structured material selection process.

And more sustainable would mean either bio-based, recycled, or in general lower environmental footprint: a lower CO2 footprint, a lower land or water use footprint. How you can achieve this is either bio-based or recycled as mentioned, or you can go down the pyramid. If you have the plastic pyramid, on the bottom you’ll have the commodities, then you have engineering…

Joachim: What is the plastic pyramid?

Lucas: I’ll just explain it. On the bottom you have the commodities, which are like the mass plastics: polypropylene, polyethylene, stuff that you would generally call plastics. Everything that’s used for packaging, basically, and those are produced in very high volume. They are usually cheap, usually low in environmental footprint. Then you have something like an engineering plastic. An engineering plastic is, for example, a nylon, a PA6, or a polycarbonate. Something that has a little more value, that is a little more expensive, but also has a higher environmental footprint. And then you have the high-performance plastics like PEEK, like PSU, stuff that you would use in implants, stuff that you would use at higher temperatures, in higher mechanical loading scenarios. Very high environmental footprint, but high performance and high price.

So what you can try to do, if you have something that is over-engineered and you use a PEEK for something that you could have done with an engineering plastic: as you move down the plastic pyramid, that is called downgrading. You can actually not only save environmental footprint, but also cash. You can save money with it. Like 20 years ago this was called optimising your product. Sometimes this is possible because your device is actually over-engineered and you have a set margin of safety of five or whatever. And sometimes it’s not possible because you already optimised your product and the engineer did well, so it’s not possible in that case.

So this would be the go-to thing. What I would say is to be avoided is to go with heuristics. A heuristic is a rule of thumb. For example, the R-principles are heuristics, so “reuse is always better.” That’s a heuristic. Sometimes this is true, but it’s not always true. What you should do instead is you should calculate. You should perform a life cycle assessment before and after, even if it’s a very rough one. You should calculate your cost, and you should check your must-requirements in terms of performance or safety at every iteration of your concept. So this is the trinity, the triple bottom line: what is good for the environment, good for the planet, and good for our profitability. Those are the three KPIs we want to optimise for, and if we don’t calculate these on an ongoing basis, we’ll just go with, “Oh, I think I heard this is more sustainable, so I’ll just do that,” and not question it whatsoever. So go with numbers and don’t go with heuristics. That is, I think, the best advice I can give.

Joachim: That’s really good advice. And the concept of a life cycle analysis. Today we’re mainly speaking on the product level and not so much on the full care pathway. Could you try and demystify that a little bit for our listeners? Because I think there are a lot of people sitting out there, and they have a lot of SKUs and a lot of products, and they’re getting some demand for life cycle analysis, and thinking, “Oh, do I have to pay 50,000 euros per each of my product items?” So how would you approach that? What does a life cycle analysis cost in basic, or premium, versions? What can you do internally?

Lucas: That is a very good question, which I also discussed on our podcast with an expert. He’s Thomas Kägi. I would highly recommend checking out that podcast, because he’s like 45 minutes just on that.

Joachim: We’ll do it in the end as well, but please give a shout-out to your podcast. What’s it called, and where can people find it?

Lucas: We’re currently rebranding it, so it was called the Gradical Podcast, and it will be called MedTech Sustainability by Design. We’re basically covering everything regarding plastic sustainability and medtech. We had one on life cycle assessment with an expert on LCA, and I’ll try to summarise as best I can. I’m a material expert, but you’ll have to understand LCA to a degree if you want to develop sustainable medical devices or sustainable products in general.

So I would say there are different tiers to this. If you just want to make good decisions, you don’t have to spend 50,000. It’s very easy to do a very rough LCA on either an Excel basis, or you can use freeware such as OpenLCA. I would highly recommend OpenLCA. It’s a very good software. It’s free, you can use it without the license, and if you get the hang of it, it’s perfectly capable to do a ventilator cradle-to-grave analysis. But if you just want to make good decisions in developing, then you just need to know, “Okay, is the direction we’re going better than before?” So you’ll have your current product design, and your future product design, and you want to change the material and see how that works in terms of environmental footprint. Usually, the material is one of the biggest levers to pull to make your product better. Also, if you have electrical medical devices, it’s use-time energy, that also has a big influence.

But if you just want to know, “Okay, I change this material from fossil-based to bio-based, what happens?” You’ll need the environmental footprint of your fossil material, and the environmental footprint of your bio-based material, which you can get either from databases, or from your supplier. And then you compare the two. You know how much material you’re using, you do that for all the parts, you sum that up. That’s a very easy calculation that everybody can do in their Excel. And then you see how much the reduction will be. This is going to be a rough estimate, plus-minus 20-25% of where your precise LCA is going to land. But it’s a rough order of magnitude, and it will help you understand: is this going to be better or not?

And then there’s an LCA properly done, with transportation, processing, everything included. There are different scopes. You can do it cradle-to-gate, so whatever I do with the material until I sell it, or I can do it cradle-to-grave, until it reaches its use phase and end of life. This is of course more complicated, because you have to understand where the product goes, where it’s transported, how likely is it to be recycled there. It’s not that easy to understand and to gather all the data. It’s usually the data availability that is the difficulty.

And then there is something that I would call a certified LCA or reviewed LCA. Something that you can put a stamp on and say, “This is certified, critically reviewed,” and something that I would, a little bit satirically, go to court with, basically. This is, for example, an Environmental Product Declaration. What you would do there is have a critical review panel review your LCA and write a review report. And then, in the end, you basically get a certified and critically reviewed LCA, which you can then use for the Environmental Product Declaration, which is basically a certificate where you get the comparable environmental footprints according to the correct product category rules. Maybe a little bit too complicated.

Joachim: No, just wanted to double-click on that. I think it’s such good advice that you gave: to find out what we need. It comes back to your point about over-engineering, right? Everybody in medtech and pharma comes from a scientific background. So you’re used to, for something to be true, we need to have the third or fourth digit after the comma. And in most cases, that’s not the case. If you’re directionally correct, at least in some cases, figure out: is this something where we need to be certified, or do we just need a compass direction that’s better than where we are today?

Lucas: This is a pretty good summary. If you just want to make better decisions, it’s okay to do it very rough and see where the order of magnitude is. And if you want to start communicating with it, you want to make marketing claims, or you want to compare to competitors, you definitely need the critically reviewed LCA in order to make that credible. And also if you look at regulations that are coming out, like the, how is it called, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, which is quite a mouthful. It basically says that you can’t tell stuff that you can’t back up with data. So if you say it’s 20% better, or 20% lower CO2 footprint, you better be able to back that up with an LCA, or you better not make that claim. So if you want to start communicating with it, do marketing with it, then that’s where you actually need the 20, 50,000 euro LCA in order to make sure that your marketing claims hold up.

Joachim: And that’s another whole great discussion there: how to get the sustainability input from the sales affiliates back into product development, and how to get the sales, the commercial force, to actually communicate rightly about the sustainable products that are being made, and capture that value. That’s where we see a lot of breakdown often.

Lucas: It’s important that you talk about it, because, Joki, you put energy in. Sometimes you pay more for the material, and then you need to sell the device in order to make it a good business case. Because we want to make sustainability a strategic advantage, and it can’t be a strategic advantage if you can’t sell the damn device. So you’ll need to have sustainability claims in order to make it a USP, because you want to tell the customer, “I’m doing something about sustainability, and I can back it up with data.” So it’s not about just talking and not walking the walk, but both. I walk the walk and I talk the talk. I need both. And then it’s difficult because sometimes people will be scared to say something about it, because they’re scared of being called a greenwasher. And on the other hand, it’s a complete necessity, and you’ll need to get sales in line, because those are the ones actually talking to customers, and if they don’t understand what this is all about, then it’s gonna break down.

Joachim: You’re completely on point. That’s a lot of the things that we work with. And I think the default is that if you’re not training your commercial organisation to use it, they’re not going to, because they’re scared of saying something wrong, and they are trained to, if they’re not trained in something, then they’re trained to not speak about it. But thank you so much, Lucas. This was awesome. And where can people find you online? You’re very active.

Lucas: They can find me on YouTube, you can just type in Lucas Pianegonda, and I have a lot of stuff on there. My podcast is on there, I do a bunch of other videos, I also do shorts. And if you want to get in contact, I think we can link my email in the description if you want. And I’m also on LinkedIn. Oh yeah, I live on LinkedIn.

Joachim: That’s great. Thankfully, a lot of medtech people live there too. True pleasure, Lucas. And just so much more to talk about, but that will be a different time.

Lucas: Thank you very much, and thank you for having me.

Joachim: My pleasure. Thanks for coming on.