History of Science Society Annual Meeting 2024: Plastic Temporalities

At the 2024 HSS Annual Meeting, Jeremy Greene convened the roundtable Plastic Temporalities: Ecologies of Disposability in Science and Medicine, bringing together historians and anthropologists to examine the material histories of plastics across laboratories, hospitals, and clinical settings.

The session explored how everyday objects - petri dishes, syringes, catheters, pipettes, gloves - became disposable, and how their cumulative waste now shapes global environmental and health challenges. Presentations highlighted how the temporalities of plastic, from single-use moments to long-term ecological persistence, complicate efforts to build sustainable scientific and medical futures.

Panelists included After the Single Use researcher Anne Kveim Lie, as well as Peter Mangesho, Adriana Fraser, Amana Mahoney, and Helge Jordheim, who drew on research spanning institutional supply chains, regulatory archives, environmental justice activism, and global clinical practice.

This roundtable underscored the role of historical research in informing sustainability debates and rethinking the future of medical and scientific waste.