Art and Sustainable Solutions to Medical Waste
By Tara Wiebe, Radical Connections
As a sustainability student who spends a lot of time thinking about minimizing harm to the planet, I surprisingly had never thought of medical waste before the pandemic. I’ve been fortunate to visit hospitals rarely. After being advised to throw out masks after their first use and seeing huge bins full of blue masks, it became clear that keeping things sanitary takes a lot of material and energy. Unfortunately, discarded masks are the least of our concerns when it comes to healthcare’s impact on the environment. In Canada, greenhouse gas emissions from healthcare in general are a significant problem. Canada is the world’s second largest healthcare waste emitter (per bed per day).
Hospitals handle a lot of hazardous waste, from pharmaceuticals to toxic chemicals from cleaning solutions. The waste impacted by those hazardous materials must then be incinerated before being thrown into landfills. As you can imagine, incineration is an energy-intensive activity. Still, it is also a crucial one since we definitely do not want the effects of hazardous materials seeping into our water, soil, or air. The bad news is that a lot of non-hazardous waste gets mixed with hazardous waste, creating unnecessary emissions and costing a lot for hospitals. Approximately 85% of healthcare waste is non-hazardous but gets treated as hazardous.
The burning of waste is not only harmful to the planet, it also harms human health. The pollutants that emerge from burning waste are linked with higher chances of some cancers and chronic illnesses.
All that unnecessarily burned waste is also a product of the fact that hospitals are often required to use single-use items as it is the most sanitary option. During the Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals used six times more single-use plastic in hospitals than usual.
Many artists within healthcare have demonstrated the accumulation of single-use plastics in hospitals through art pieces.
Tilda Shalof, a nurse at Toronto General Hospital, collected medicine caps, tube connectors and vial lids in her 28 years in the intensive care unit. Her collection eventually led to a colourful 10,000-piece mural hanging in the Toronto General Hospital.
Following her battle with breast cancer, Maria Koijck underwent reconstructive breast surgery and asked the team of surgeons to hold on to all the waste from her surgery. Marie says she was shocked when they handed her 6 full trash bags of garbage from her procedure. She asks: “Humans always seek to ‘get better’, but what is the cost to our environment?” Watch the video to see Maria surrounded by the incredible amount of waste generated by her surgery.
Luckily for us, there are ways in which hospitals can generate less environmental harm. For one, better waste sorting systems in healthcare spaces can make a significant difference. At the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, neuropathologist Laurette Geldenhuys reduced the “hazardous waste” volume by 75% in her lab by conducting an audit and providing the lab with additional bins for garbage and recycling. Additionally, this research paper explores a world in which healthcare develops a circular economy. Instead of buying something, using it and throwing it out, there are innovative ways in which hospitals can extend the lifetime of their materials. For instance, hospitals can use a service model where they would buy access to their equipment instead of ownership. Service provider companies like Cohealo own the medical equipment. They transport it between hospitals and maintain it. This not only reduces the environmental harm of medical equipment because less needs to be produced, but it also reduces costs for hospitals and improves their capacity to treat all patients.
References
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Kenny, C., & Priyadarshini, A. (2021). Review of Current Healthcare Waste Management
Methods and Their Effect on Global Health. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 9(3), 284. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9030284
Mohamed Alsayed Metwally, A. (2017). What Will the ‘Sharing Economy’ Mean for Healthcare?
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