Health Inc. Seminar Series Disposability, medical waste, and medical industry 

Convenience does not equate to necessity: Mitigating the harms of single-use plastics in healthcare 

Featuring Dr. Jeremy Greene, William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and History of Medicine and Director, of the Institute of the History of Medicine at John Hopkins University

April 10 | 12 PM – 1 PM | Online via Zoom

After 18 months of negotiations, in November 2024, representatives of 200 nations failed to come to agreement around the terms of a multilateral, legally binding treaty to mitigate the harms of plastic pollution. A coalition of oil-producing nations and industry groups opposed capping plastic production, arguing that efforts should only focus on managing waste. Proposed text for the treaty also included a blanket exemption of plastic products for medical and health uses and responses to public health emergencies. In this seminar, we will examine discourses around single-use, disposable, plastic products in healthcare including the ways that medically-related industry has promoted the idea that these products are not only convenient, but necessary. We will discuss the need for counter-measures to resist efforts by the petrochemical industry to undermine the precautionary principle, explore how to support other stakeholders, like engineers and manufacturers exploring alternatives to single-use plastics, and ask how healthcare can play a leading role in mitigating the health harms of plastic. 

Recommended readings: 

Street, A. et al, (2024). Why medical products must not be excluded from the Global Plastics Treaty. The Lancet, 404(10464), 1708-1710.  

Greene, J., Skolnik, C.L., & Merritt, M.W. (2022). How medicine becomes trash: disposability in healthcare. The Lancet, 400(10360), 1298-1299 

Presenter Bio: Dr. Greene is William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and History of Medicine and Director, of the Institute of the History of Medicine and the founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His research 

explores the ways in which medical technologies come to influence our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal, on personal, regional, and global scales. His newest research project, Syringe Tide: Disposable Technologies and the Making of Medical Waste focuses on the scientific, social, and economic basis of the shift towards disposable technologies in hospitals and clinics that have made the health care industry one of the largest carbon-emitting and plastic waste-producing sectors of the global economy, and what might be done to correct this.