Guest: Alejandra Medina, Chief Sustainability Officer, Quipment SAS **Host:** Frederik van Deurs **Recorded:** 25 March 2026 **Context:** Part of the mini-series with the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition (SHC) and its Community of Practice for Clinical Trials. Frederik and Alejandra first met at the SHC Community of Practice conference in London, November 2025.

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Frederik: Today I have with me Alejandra Medina. The reason we have Alejandra here is that we met at a conference with the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition and the Community of Practice for Clinical Trials back in November in London, 2025, and Alejandra has agreed to share some of the insights she shared on stage with us here on the podcast. So without further ado, Alejandra, welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast.

Alejandra: Thank you very much, Fred.

Frederik: Alejandra, when you’re not busy decarbonising clinical trials, what do you like to do?

Alejandra: I’m a mother of two big kids now, and I love to spend time with them — just walking around. I love to discover new places and new people. I’m Mexican, so now that I’m in Europe it’s nice to be here because I can discover a lot of different things. That’s something I love and share with my family.

Frederik: But you miss the Mexican food, of course.

Alejandra: I can make Mexican food, so I don’t miss it — I do it myself. And I find some nice places to buy products coming from Mexico.

Frederik: Get the proper tortillas and everything.

Alejandra: Yes, proper tortillas — that’s the hardest thing. There’s local production of tortillas; I buy tortillas made in the East of Europe.

Frederik: And as they should. Thanks for sharing, Alejandra. Can you tell us a bit more about Quipment and how you got started in your role as a sustainability officer? For new listeners who aren’t familiar, you work as the sustainability officer at Quipment, supplying goods and services to the clinical trial space.

Alejandra: Yes. Quipment is a French company founded in 2010 in Nancy — so we’re based in Nancy. We’re a provider of equipment solutions for clinical trials. We support the activities of CROs, sponsors and biotechs as they develop and test new drugs across all therapeutic areas. Our job is to equip and maintain all the sites in full operating condition from the beginning to the end of the study. That includes not just sending the materials to the sites, but the maintenance, testing, verification and configuration of equipment. The idea is that when equipment arrives at the site, it’s ready to be used.

Frederik: What are the most common pieces of equipment, and what do they do?

Alejandra: We have medical devices — ECGs, infusion pumps, glucometers, oximeters — and laboratory equipment like fridges, centrifuges, data loggers (a lot of data loggers). That’s the main portfolio that we sell. But we have more than 3,000 different products, because we equip the whole site — we send the consumables and everything they need to run the protocol. It could be toys, it could be tables, depending on the study. But the value we give our clients is in the equipment, because it’s not just sending the product — it’s the solutions and the services included: maintenance, calibration, traceability. We can give them complete traceability of the product at each part of the life cycle of the study.

And one thing that’s very important — and it helps explain our business model — is that all the services we provide to clients are made in-house. We have biomedical technicians prepared to do this kind of service, and that helps us guarantee the quality of the equipment and the precision it will maintain during the trial. So we can assure that the data collected with this equipment is going to be reliable and accurate, and therefore useful for our clients. Quality is a very important part of our job, as is compliance.

Frederik: That makes perfect sense. And how did you get started yourself in your role as a sustainability officer?

Alejandra: This position relates to some specific things the founders of Quipment wanted to do. The three founders are very environmentally engaged people, with deep convictions about the environment and the social side. In 2020 they decided to become a certified B Corp. When I arrived at Quipment four years ago as quality director, they gave me this project. Working through the assessment helped us realise that Quipment has a business model with a positive environmental impact — because the way we handle this equipment as off-site assets fits the idea of a circular economy. We rent the equipment during the clinical trial, then it’s returned to us, and we can reprocess it and use it for another study.

Frederik: That’s definitely an inherent-impact business model, as you’d call it in the B Corp framework. For everyone not familiar — I know a bit about it because I’m a trained B Leader — the best way to understand B Corp certification is that you’re asked questions about your business in a holistic, 360-degree manner. There are around 220 questions you have to provide documentation for. It’s a very comprehensive due diligence process where all aspects of your business are analysed — environmental, social, economic impacts — and put together in a B Corp score. If that score is high enough, you achieve certification. It’s globally recognised as one of the most difficult sustainability certifications to obtain.

The larger and more regulated you are, the harder it is. So I’m really impressed you managed to get B Corp certified. The biggest pharmaceutical company I know with a B Corp certification is the Italian company Chiesi, and I know how much they went through to obtain it. One thing that earns a lot of points in the B Corp assessment is having an impact business model — which is what you’re describing: you’re essentially renting out the equipment, equipment-as-a-service as part of clinical trials. That massively reduces the carbon footprint, because instead of a piece of equipment being used just once or occasionally, it’s almost always being used somewhere in Quipment’s value chain. Kudos for that.

Alejandra: Yes, and I think we didn’t change anything. We had this idea that we were circular by design, because Quipment was founded with this kind of business model — rental. In some cases companies prefer to buy products, so we thought about how to align that with our circular model: we can sell a new product and then buy it back, re-entering the equipment into our process. Or we can offer reprocessed, second-hand products. Becoming B Corp put our business model at the centre, and now it’s a source of innovation. We’re always trying to maintain this circular approach. We didn’t change anything — we just changed the way we explain our business, to be aligned and contribute to the transition of an economic model. B Corp pushes companies to do business in a responsible way, and we discovered we could, because from the beginning we were constructed this way.

Frederik: That’s amazing. From your point of view, Alejandra, when you look out at clinical trials as a practice, where do you see circularity most often breaking down in practice?

Alejandra: From my side and my point of view: today we have an internal challenge. Even though our activity is mostly circular, we still have some linear activity — because not all the actors are convinced. They have habits; they’re used to working in a linear model. That’s our big challenge, because we need to explain that going through these circularity models is safe — there’s no additional risk, because the equipment is going to be treated correctly and will perform. So we have to convince and bring more actors along, and inform them that they can do this. It’s aligned with their requirements and it has a positive impact — positive on quality, regulatory and performance of their clinical trials.

We’ve now proven, through benchmarking, that it has a positive impact in reducing carbon. And in some cases it can increase operational performance, because an actor like us deals with the preparation and the training of the equipment. So circularity is difficult not because of the circularity itself, but because we have to transform and convince people to come to this model.

Frederik: So there’s still a bit of political navigation, where you have to massage this idea into the stakeholders for them to accept doing things in a new way — essentially a better way. What’s the cost comparison? Is there a cost for buyers to go circular, or is it cost-comparable?

Alejandra: For the services, it’s the same price. Obviously buying or renting is different, but the services are the same price.

Frederik: What have you learned about designing around these friction points — the fact that you still have to sell the idea a little?

Alejandra: We can’t do it alone. We need more actors like us, because you can’t transform something if you don’t have other actors. We’re very aligned with our business model and we’re working on it, but we need to be more — not just clients, but actors like us. What we’ve learned is that we have to inform people. That’s very important, and it relates to the tools we launched and discussed at the conference in London. To transform and empower others to take decisions that go this way, we need to inform them. As an actor like us, we don’t have the responsibility of the choice — we just offer. Clients come to us and ask for materials and a supply strategy. So the one thing we can do is give them the information. That’s why we decided to build some tools to help them have the information and then take the decisions they want to take.

Frederik: Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a bit what you’ve built with the Quipment Carbon Compass — a tool that compares sourcing options across price, lead time and carbon impact? I’m curious about the architecture behind it. What’s it built on, how did you arrive at the assumptions, and can anyone use it, or is it restricted to your clients?

Alejandra: The Quipment Carbon Compass is a tool included in our quotation tool. It’s not a calculator like the SHC carbon calculator — it’s a comparator included in our quotation process. The basis is a benchmark we did in the context of the B Corp certification, because we had to prove with numbers that our business model has a positive impact. The calculator compares two business models: the linear one — production of the product, transport to the site, and destruction (a hypothetical case) — versus the circular one, which has production and transport but not the same end-of-life. Comparing the two, we demonstrated that going from linear to circular reduces the carbon footprint by 40%.

Frederik: A 40% reduction by going from linear to circular — that’s a similar gain to what the Sustainable Markets Initiative has estimated you can get from moving from physical to more digital clinical trials, also around 40% CO₂ saving. But here with the equipment it’s at a similar price, so it’s mostly a carbon saving rather than a price saving.

Alejandra: Yes. This is the methodology we applied to the Quipment Carbon Compass. Obviously, depending on the quotation — the devices, consumables and things the client asks for — you get different percentages. It also depends on the distance to the sites. We have three technical service centres — in the US, in Europe and in Japan — so we handle our transport that way. The client gets a quotation, and at the bottom they see the percentage reduction in emissions resulting from their choice. The Carbon Compass isn’t a calculator — it’s a comparator. It gives information to our clients.

Frederik: When you’re going through the B Impact Assessment, do you have a task that’s the most difficult to solve before the next assessment?

Alejandra: The point is that the standard has changed in a deep way. We’re starting to prepare our new certification, but B Corp has changed everything. The standard now isn’t a five-pillar standard — it’s seven pillars — and it’s no longer a story of points. Now there are certain points that are an obligation; you have to meet them to achieve certification. And all the pillars have the same weight, because in the last standard, governance and the notion of impact business were very important and in some cases weren’t calibrated. So they’re pushing companies to have a very holistic, complete sustainability approach. It’s going to change a lot, and we’re working to learn the new standards. A lot of things are the same, but it’s a different way to go through the certification.

Frederik: That’s super interesting — I’m looking forward to hearing more about your process. Alejandra, when you work in sustainability — and in our line of work — we’re exposed to bad news quite often: the climate crisis, geopolitical crises, humanitarian crises. It’s very easy to despair and look out with a bleak outlook. But I have a feeling that most of the time when we’re talking, you’re smiling, and you seem like a very joyous person. So I’m curious: what gives you hope for the future?

Alejandra: That’s an interesting question. Here at Quipment I coordinate the [business] continuity plan — I’ve made three continuity plans for three different sites, and it’s hard to do that. But I think there are a lot of people trying to do things that are going to be positive for all of us. It’s very nice to work in a company that tries to do things in a way that isn’t just about making business and contributing to drug development — it’s about doing business in a way that’s positive for the planet. And I think there are more people like us. Talking with you today, being part of the community last time, talking now with all the different actors, our vendors, our community — there’s a great amount of people doing things to keep a better world. So I can’t just look at the things that aren’t going well. There’s a lot going in the good direction. Even in these conditions, we try to keep working and moving forward. We’re not alone — there’s a lot of people. I discovered a huge community doing that. We’re in evolution, and we’re going to change the way we do things, but we’re on the way. So yes, I can smile.

Frederik: Thank you, Alejandra — I think that’s an amazing way to round off. Thank you so much for your time today, and for being part of this mini-series with the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition and the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. To everyone listening: remember to like, subscribe and share this episode if you liked it, and tell us who you’d like us to invite on the show so we can have more interesting guests like Alejandra. Thank you so much, Alejandra. I hope you have a great day.

Alejandra: Thank you very much, Fred. Bye.