How Medicine Becomes Trash: Healthcare Waste as Environmental Crisis

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In October 2025, Jeremy Greene delivered the invited lecture ‘How Medicine Becomes Trash: Healthcare Waste as Environmental Crisis’ for the Department of Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College.

The lecture began with a striking distinction: while healthcare waste is often understood as inherently hazardous, only around 15% requires specialised management because of infection risk, chemical toxicity or radioactivity. The remaining 85% consists largely of materials designed to be disposable rather than reusable. When incinerated, landfilled or released into the environment, this waste contributes to toxic emissions, greenhouse gases and plastic pollution.

Greene traced how single-use masks, surgical drapes, plastic syringes, diagnostic tests and other disposable technologies became naturalised within medicine, despite their relatively recent history. Bringing together environmental history and the history of technology, the lecture challenged medical waste as an inevitable category. Instead, it presented disposability as the outcome of social and institutional choices made in the past—and therefore choices that can be reconsidered in the future.