Institute for Health Seminar with Dr. Jeremy Greene

Rutgers Institute for Health Seminar

featuring

Jeremy Greene, MD, PhD of Johns Hopkins University

“After the Single Use: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Plastics in Healthcare”

Register to attend this seminar.

Location: In-Person at Rutgers Institute for Health, Conference Room 120, 112 Paterson Street, New Brunswick, NJ

Via Zoom (upon registration, you will receive Zoom details)

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.

“After the Single Use: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Plastics in Healthcare”

The modern medical enterprise is distinctively wasteful.  This may seem to result inevitably from the hazardous nature of medical substances, whose infection risk, chemical toxicity, or radioactivity accordingly require specialized modes of management.  Yet only 15% of global healthcare wastes fit this specialized profile.  The remaining 85% are simply materials that have been built to be disposable rather than reusable, a staggering volume of single-use items that emit toxins and carbon dioxide when incinerated, give off methane and other greenhouse gasses while decomposing in landfills, or, if they escape these two fates, float on the surface of the oceans.

It was not always this way.  In a relatively short period of time, we have naturalized the use of single-use plastics in healthcare—and then forgotten there was ever any alternative.  In this talk, physician-historian Jeremy Greene traces the links between environmental history, the history of technology, and the  role that the global healthcare sector now plays in contributing to climate change and plastic waste—and in innovating new solutions to envision more sustainable forms of healthcare.  By attending closely to the historical and social context in which medicine became wasteful, Greene’s talk offers ways to unseat medical waste as a natural category and reconsider it as the outcome of a set of value decisions we have made in the past, and can change in the future.