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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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Acquiring enough personal protective equipment and supplies to test for and treat COVID-19 in the United States was a major challenge in 2020. With case numbers rising and vaccines rolling out, managing supplies and reducing waste continues as a huge issue this year.
Isolation gowns, gloves, masks, needles, syringes and vials discarded after use: some waste is inevitable, but supply chain leaders are finding ways to reduce quantities, reusing and recycling when possible and adjusting procurement and packaging to help the environment and sometimes their bottom line.
Hospitals generate around 30 pounds of waste per patient per day, said Janet Howard, member engagement director of Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit environmental stewardship membership organization. The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council said that amounts to about 14,000 tons of waste daily, a quarter of which is plastic packaging and products. The World Health Organization estimates that about 85
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Medical device companies can make a difference when it comes to sustainability, according to a senior packaging engineer at Medtronic who spoke during Virtual Engineering Week.
In the Virtual Engineering Week session, “How to Make Medical Packaging More Sustainable,” Jennifer Griffin, senior packaging engineer at Medtronic, shared her recent visit to a tranquil fishing village along the Atlantic in Massachusetts. She spoke of noticing the still waters, when suddenly, the quiet was interrupted by a loud, rapid, pinging noise.
It was a seagull in a white rowboat, playing with a piece of plastic trash, picking it up in his beak and dropping it onto the hard surface of the boat and into the water. “He was purposely dropping it into the water and then retrieving it,” Griffin said. “I had never seen this behavior before. This looked like a child playing with a toy.