How communities have been challenging PVC in healthcare
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After the Single Use Research Fellow Cat Acheson has written an article for Health Care Without Harm exploring more than three decades of community action challenging PVC in healthcare. Drawing on her ongoing archival research, interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with the organisation, Cat examines how environmental justice groups, healthcare professionals and campaigners have pushed for change and the obstacles they continue to face.
PVC remains widely used in medical devices, including IV tubing, despite longstanding concerns about its effects on human health and the environment. The article outlines how these risks extend across its lifecycle, from pollution during production to patients’ exposure to chemical additives and the release of hazardous substances during disposal. It asks why PVC remains so embedded in healthcare, and what it will take to move towards safer alternatives.
From community campaigns to changes in guidance
Cat traces the movement against PVC medical waste incineration back to the 1990s, when concerns about dioxin emissions brought together environmental organisations, health associations and grassroots groups. In the United States, environmental justice campaigners highlighted the disproportionate effects of incinerator pollution on low-income and racialised minority communities. Opposition to the incineration of medical waste containing PVC and mercury was also a founding issue for Health Care Without Harm in 1996.
The article explores how this collective pressure helped bring about changes in World Health Organization guidance, with its 1998 healthcare waste handbook stating that PVC and other chlorinated wastes should not be burned. These campaigns demonstrate how communities have challenged established waste practices and demanded greater accountability for healthcare’s environmental impacts.
Challenging PVC’s place in healthcare
Beyond waste disposal, campaigners have increasingly called for PVC to be phased out of healthcare altogether. Cat examines the persistent argument that PVC is indispensable to life-saving care, contrasting it with efforts to introduce safer alternatives. These include Health Care Without Harm Europe’s work supporting two German hospitals to move away from PVC in selected products, including adult IV tubing and filters used in paediatric and neonatal care.
The article also considers calls for stronger regulation of PVC and its additives, including restrictions on groups of chemicals to prevent one harmful substance simply being replaced with another. Against the backdrop of Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, it explores how claims about plastics’ essential role in healthcare have become a contested part of wider debates about plastics production and regulation.
While significant barriers remain—including industry resistance, established supply chains and political pressure to reduce regulation—Cat highlights the continuing role of coalitions in driving change. Community organisations, health professionals and hospitals are not only challenging harmful practices, but also helping to demonstrate what healthcare with fewer toxic materials could look like.
Read the full article on the Health Care Without Harm website
