From hospital sterilisation to global production networks: the hidden costs of disposability in medicine

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Anne Kveim Lie took part in our project panel - Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Plastics in Medicine - at the 2025 European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) conference in Berlin.

Summary of Anne's provocation:

During the 1970s shift towards disposability in Europe’s public hospitals, one important justification was to ease healthcare personnel shortages by eliminating the time-consuming task of sterilising reusable equipment. However, this change did not eliminate the labour of supplying essential medical items — it merely shifted it. Instead of hospital staff handling sterilisation, the burden fell on low-paid factory workers in plastic manufacturing, who toiled in hazardous conditions. This outsourcing of labour exposed the hidden costs of disposability.

As the decade progressed, factory workers began protesting unsafe conditions, demanding stronger regulations to protect both industrial workers and hospital staff. By the 1980s, production of single-use plastics was further outsourced to factories in Asia, including to India, with Hyderabad eventually emerging as a major production hub. Here, large-scale manufacturing sites supplied medical plastics to global markets, relying on cheap labour and operating under weaker regulations.

Drawing on archival material, policy documents and oral history interviews, we will demonstrate how this shift embedded disposability within global supply chains, deepening the environmental and social consequences of the medical industry’s reliance on single-use objects.  

Read the panel summary here and find out more in this blogpost.