Single Use Plastics in Healthcare (Title TBC)

The global medical plastics market is worth US$22.26bn and the British National Health Service (NHS) produces approximately 2,500 tonnes of plastic waste daily. The issue of plastic healthcare waste has received increasing attention within the social sciences. By contrast, the processes by

which plastics have become central to Western biomedicine have remained comparatively underexamined. This project will address this significant research gap.

The project approaches single-use medical plastics as a critical healthcare infrastructure, which is undergirded by claims to cleanliness and the promise of disposability. Via ethnographic and archival analysis, the project

will interrogate the development of this infrastructure and the managerial, regulatory, clinical and waste work needed to continually maintain and reproduce it within the hospital landscape.

This project, which focuses on single-use medical plastics the NHS, is situated at the intersection of medical and economic geography, science and technology studies (STS), and

geographical and anthropological studies of infrastructure. This research is invested with particular urgency in the face of growing evidence about the ecologically damaging effects of plastics throughout their life-cycle.

The empirical and conceptual stakes of the project are threefold: i) it moves beyond an understanding of medical plastics

as 'inevitable', to uncover the contingency of their place in biomedicine; ii) it examines the interrelation of healthcare

with the petrochemical industry and considers how this relationship is continually reproduced; iii) it provides essential historical, sociocultural and economic context for those developing sustainable alternatives.