Bart Van Straten

Dr. Bart van Straten, MBA received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and has extensive experience in the medical field. He is active in several areas.

He works in his family company, Van Straten Medical, which was founded in 1975 by his father Jaap van Straten. From the year 2000, he and his brother, Niels, started slowly transforming the company into a fully circular production company. After having acquired the company Medical Repairs, they changed the mission of Van Straten Medical with aim of only developing circular designed products. Bart started to experiment with medical devices made out of waste. His professional mission became a personal mission.

Based on the statement that we did not inherit the world from our parents but that we borrow the world from our children, he started to dedicate his life to his mission to minimize waste. Bart co-founded GreenCycl, an organization for making healthcare more sustainable.

He was co-author of the national NEN-guideline for reusing single-use medical devices in times of crisis which was published by NEN (Royal Netherlands Standardization Institute) on 1 June 2020.

After completing the University Teaching Qualification (BKO/UTQ) at TU Delft Teaching Academy in 2021, Bart focused on integrating sustainability engineering and circular design in education at TU Delft. As a lector at TU Delft but also for the general public he designed dedicated online courses about the circular economy for self-paced learning. Bart fulfills several public functions including being a member of the supervisory board of the Leiden Instrument Makers School and as Chairman of the NEN Platform ‘Sustainability and Medical Devices’.