After the Single Use: Rethinking medical devices for reuse, renewal, and resilience

If the world’s healthcare sector were a country, it would rank 5th among nations in terms of its carbon footprint. A staggering portion of these emissions derive from the manufacture, transportation and incineration of single-use plastic products, such as surgical drapes, syringes, or diagnostic devices that are designed for disposability. In the relatively short period of time since single-use medical products were introduced, we have naturalized their use. After the Single Use, a bold ethnographic, historical and art cooperative across eight nations asks: how did we get here, and what would it take to return (or transform) health care to a circular economy of reuse instead of a linear economy of waste and discard? Drawing together scholars and methods from history, anthropology, art research and public health, we examine the historical local and global contingencies that have brought us to the present moment of crisis in medical waste, analyse the circulations and lifecycles of single-use medical technologies designed for disposal in landfill and incinerators, and establish collaborations with policy-makers, activists and engineers/designers to build circular healthcare solutions. Our goal is to establish a new field of critical humanities, art and social science research on medical waste and circular healthcare economies.