The Plastic Pandemic

Event organiser/host: Edinburgh Earth Initiative (UoE) and the Global Research Institute of Health and Care Engineering (HWU)

On 1st June 2023, After the Single Use team members organised a workshop on the role of single-use plastics in the Covid-19 pandemic response and efforts to redesign medical devices for sustainability.

The global effort to develop, manufacture and distribute life-saving medical devices to counter the Covid-19 pandemic was unparalleled in speed and scale. Hitherto unprecedented quantities of single use diagnostics, vaccine vials and syringes, and disposable face masks were transported around the world, used and, somehow, disposed of. 

In the context of a public health emergency, the life-saving qualities of such devices far outweighed concerns about where the plastics that they were made from might end up. Yet, the mountains of Covid-waste that were left behind also reveal how essential single-use plastics have become to modern health-systems in general and the urgent need to reinvent our systems of medical innovation, manufacturing, distribution and disposal for a more circular and sustainable age.

This joint University of Edinburgh and Heriot Watt University event brought together researchers from the history of medicine, medical anthropology, engineering and NHS Scotland to explore the contingent histories and possible futures of single-use medical devices. We aim to foster fruitful exchanges and conversations around what can be learned about medical disposability from the distant and recent past, what is desirable and feasible in terms of building sustainable medical futures, and possibilities for collaboration between the social sciences and engineering, and across Scotland’s universities.

A full report of the event can be found here: https://earth.ed.ac.uk/news/the-plastic-pandemic-rethinking-medical-device-innovation-use-and-disposal-for-a-circular-economy/