By Sarah Currie-Halpern, Co-Founder and Partner, Think Zero LLC
A rather straightforward example of the environmental problem of medical waste appeared on beaches across the East Coast earlier this week. In Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland, local officials moved to limit beach access after a “significant amount” of hypodermic needles and medical waste washed ashore. The exact source of the waste wasn’t immediately clear, but the broader one was: the medical industry has a waste problem, and that problem is nothing short of a climate emergency.
This isn’t new. Medical waste has been washing up on beaches around the world for decades. The “syringe tide” environmental disaster infamously shut down the Jersey Shore in 1987 and 1988. By June 2020, less than a year into the global pandemic, single-use face masks and latex gloves were already being found en masse among Mediterranean marine debris and along the shores of the Soko Islands in Hong Kong. The implications here are drastic, considering that one single-use face mask takes 450 years to decompose. Now multiply that by the 2023 estimate that put global use at 15 trillion masks per year, and you get some 2 megatons of annual waste decomposing at a glacial pace.
Medical waste had a severely detrimental impact on the environment long before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, but the pandemic exacerbated the problem in direct and indirect ways. According to MIT, the pandemic was generating up to 7,200 tons of medical waste each day by mid-2021. Beyond increasing the amount of waste hospitals were tossing out, however, the pandemic pushed hospitals further away from sterilizable metal instruments and towards single-use plastic products.
It’s fair to say that the pandemic has subsided significantly even if Covid-19 is by no means eliminated. Despite greatly reduced infection numbers, hospitals have stuck with these single-use plastic instruments instead of returning to sterilizable metal ones. Meanwhile, some single-use items simply must be and remain single-use to maintain sterility, such as gloves and syringes.
The trouble is that once these gloves, syringes, and other single-use instruments are used, they are thrown in the garbage. Any waste that falls under bio-hazardous, as in having touched a human body, must be incinerated. Once incinerated, this waste releases these chemicals and residual pathogens into the air people breathe, and into the ground due to residual, toxic incinerator bottom ash (IBA).
There are two fundamental issues with the current medical waste situation. The first is the real and observable ways the physical waste harms the environment by clogging waterways and contaminating land and oceans. The second is its underlying myopia. Medical waste pollutes our air and water, and people who drink polluted water and breathe polluted air will eventually suffer health problems that could have otherwise been avoided. The medical waste problem is a climate bomb that is going off right now, and a ticking time bomb for the health of an untold number of people. By trying to make people healthy today, the medical industry is making them sick tomorrow.
Existing solutions can help stem this problem now, even if the medical industry still needs a total overhaul in the long-term when it comes to waste. Outside of bio-hazardous chemicals and materials, pharmaceutical startups like Cabinet Health have started dispensing prescription medications in reusable packaging as opposed to single-use plastic bottles. Moreover, hospitals need to return to using sterilizable metal instruments instead of plastic single-use ones, and start implementing energy from waste (EFW) solutions that turn the heat and steam generated by incineration into power. The medical waste crisis is the product of one-size-fits-all thinking around disposal. Fixing it won’t be.
Comentarios