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When Jodi Sherman first started working in hospitals, she was struck by the amount of plastic used on a daily basis. She wondered how single-use plastics could be consistent with the Hippocratic oath’s first principle to do no harm. It’s clear that these materials come from somewhere and they go somewhere and they must be causing harm, says Sherman, an anesthesiologist at Yale New Haven Hospital and founding director of the Program on Healthcare Environmental Sustainability at the Yale Center for Climate Change and Health.
But not all of her colleagues and patients see it that way, because plastic is an embedded feature of patient care. According to the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council, 20–25 percent of all hospital waste in the United States is plastic amounting to more than 1 million tons annually.
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