Medtronic: Health care sustainability is essential to Medtronic

Padina Pezeshki has had an impressive journey with medical device maker Medtronic Canada. In 2020, she was hired as a medical science adviser and clinical research specialist for the company’s medical surgical portfolio. Today she is one of the firm’s medical science liaisons. She continues to cover her initial portfolio, but she also covers sustainability.

“I got into this because green and sustainable practices are a trending topic within the surgical field and the operating room, which I support, and this is personally close to my heart,” says Pezeshki. “I started looking into it more, learning about it, making personal connections and I grew to own it more formally.”

Brampton, Ont.-based Medtronic recently received several sustainability accolades and awards. Pezeshki highlights two – one for emitting 42 per cent less carbon dioxide per every dollar of revenue and another for being one of the world’s most ethical companies.

“I think those awards alone speak to the way that Medtronic is aligned with sustainability, environmentalism, being green and just mindful of the planet and health,” Pezeshki says. “Living a healthy life isn’t possible unless it’s on a healthy planet.”

Medtronic began in the 1950s making bulky pacemakers, devices that are now the size of a vitamin and inserted through a catheter. The Canadian headquarters has electric vehicle charging stations and there’s a hybrid work model so employees can reduce commuting.

“Our headquarters happens to be our first LEED-certified green building, which is a blueprint for other Medtronic sites,” says Pezeshki.

Maisie Cheung, senior marketing director, says sustainability is one of Medtronic’s five strategic pillars in Canada. “So we aspire to be in the forefront working with the health-care systems here to look for meaningful initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint.”

Cheung adds that her group has just recruited an environmental scientist to join the marketing team to help make the right sustainable initiatives to pursue with customers.

“The more sustainable our products and business model are, the better we all are as global citizens and certainly as Canadian corporations,” says Cheung.

While the first front is to work with Canadian health-care systems, the second front is to work with industry and green associations, she says.

“We’ve been invited to sit on the industry committees in terms of sustainability. We’ll work with partners to define what are the near-term, midterm and long-term targets we can all strive to achieve,” Cheung says.

Medtronic is also a founding member of the Canadian Coalition for Green Healthcare, which focuses on the development of an environmentally sustainable, net-zero and climate-resilient health system.

“We are also in one-to-one discussions with our biggest customers to talk about our list of sustainable ideas and, together, to prioritize what’s most meaningful. Needless to say, these are the largest organizations in the country in terms of health-care delivery,” Cheung says. “Carbon emission is really in the supply chain, so several initiatives on our list explore with customers how to address that specifically.”

Pezeshki adds, “For the whole company, we have an operational carbon neutrality goal to be achieved by our 2030 financial year.”

Finding the right supplier to collect waste and transform it into raw material for industrial use is a challenge because it’s an emerging field.

“From a research and development standpoint, we’re starting to design products with the purpose of sustainability without compromising patient safety,” says Cheung.

“We are trying very hard to design effective products that have a big component of reusability.”

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Advertising feature produced by Canada’s Top 100 Employers, a division of Mediacorp Canada Inc. The Globe and Mail’s editorial department was not involved.