The urgency of a Circular healthcare economy amidst geopolitical turbulence; strategies in the fight against raw materials and energy scarcity

• Healthcare waste contains highly valuable materials. • Technology is available to reprocess medical waste streams into high quality raw materials. • Global instability is increasingly driven by raw material scarcity. • Territorial claims and geopolitical tensions are rising in regions like Ukraine, Congo, Greenland, and Canada due to their strategic resource reserves. • There is a paradox: we incinerate waste while the global demand for critical raw materials intensifies. • Technology and science offer proven methods to recycle and recover valuable materials from surgical waste and hospital disposables.