By remanufacturing single-use medical devices, Vanguard significantly reduces CO₂ emissions, material consumption, and waste volumes. These climate and resource benefits strengthen both the Carbon Handprint and the wider Environmental Handprint, ensuring that the positive impacts of circular healthcare are transparently captured and communicated.
What does the Handprint stand for?
The Handprint represents the advantages created through our processes and initiatives – such as avoided CO₂ emissions, material savings, and circular innovations. It complements the traditional Footprint, which reflects emissions, energy consumption, and waste.
Our goal: reduce the Footprint and expand the Handprint through intelligent design, efficient production, and strong partnerships.
How Vanguard strengthens its Environmental and Carbon Handprint
Vanguard strengthens its Environmental and Carbon Handprint through several ongoing initiatives across different areas of impact.
Environmental Handprint: Medical remanufacturing helps avoid the production of new devices, reducing material use and CO₂ emissions.
Plastic Recovery: Vanguard offsets part of its plastics use through CleanHub, which enables certified plastic recovery.
Agroforestry Partnership: Vanguard has launched an agroforestry partnership with Gut & Bösel. The project is currently in its development phase and aims to support long-term ecological restoration and soil improvement at the site. The CO₂ removal potential will only materialize once the trees are planted and mature and is therefore not currently used for emissions compensation.
100% Green Electricity: Switching to 100% renewable electricity fully eliminates market-based electricity emissions.
“Our Carbon Handprint shows how diverse the positive effects of our work truly are,” says Joshua Okojie, ESG Manager at Vanguard AG. “From remanufacturing and material circularity to long-term ecological projects—each of these measures strengthens circular healthcare and sustainably reduces resource consumption.”
Joshua Okojie, ESG Manager
