One way the health care sector can help curb the threat posed by plastics in the future is to return to some practices of the past, says Dr. Philip J. Landrigan.
Landrigan led a CHA webinar in March focused on the climate and health risks of plastics. The webinar was part of CHA's observance of Earth Day, which is April 22. He discussed how health care providers have moved away from a "circular economy" in which medical supplies such as gowns and masks were made of reusable materials.
"We don't really need plastic sheets. We really don't need plastic gowns," he said. "We really don't need plastic instrument trays, where we throw the whole tray away at the end of the procedure. We can go back to recyclable, reusable materials, return to our circular economy."
Landrigan is a biology professor at Boston College, where he directs the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good and the Global Observatory on Planetary Health. He has a long resume related to addressing the health risks of pollution and climate change. Among his research findings was a link between low-level lead exposure and lower IQs in children, which helped prompt federal regulators to remove lead from gasoline.
In the webinar, Landrigan covered the "very profound and pervasive impacts on human health" caused by the production, use and disposal of plastics.
"Like so many environmental threats to health, those impacts fall most heavily upon the most vulnerable people in our population, especially unborn children in the womb, small kids, poor people, minorities, marginalized people, indigenous, people in low- and middle-income countries, people in small island states," he said. "All of those who contribute very little to the plastics crisis are the people that suffer its worst health effects."
Those health effects include the hazards faced by the people who do the dangerous work of extracting the fossil fuels needed to produce plastics and the risks posed by exposure to the toxic chemicals in plastic products that can leach out when those products are used and trashed.
"These chemicals could cause cancer, cause heart disease, obesity, diabetes, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome," Landrigan said. "The chemicals in plastics are really a soup of toxicity with multiple adverse effects."
Landrigan referenced an editorial that appeared in the medical journal The Lancet last fall that urged the health care sector to "untangle necessity from convenience" when it comes to the use of plastic supplies.
He noted that some plastic use in health care is essential, such as for IV tubes and for scopes needed to examine the body. But he said care providers could employ glass syringes, rubber tubing and other reusable items that were in wide use before being replaced by nonrecyclable plastic supplies.
"It's quite possible to go back, if we have the will to do it," he said. "Right now, we're using plastic because it's convenient. We throw it away. We don't understand that that plastic is causing great harm and great cost, because the harm and the costs are falling on other people. But make no mistake about it, those harms are very real. They're very great."
A recording of the full webinar is available at chausa.org/earthday.