After the Single Use is a global research collaboration rethinking healthcare’s reliance on disposable medical technologies. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, artists, and public health researchers across eight countries, the project explores the social, environmental, and historical dimensions of single-use plastics in healthcare. Through interdisciplinary research and creative engagement, it aims to imagine and build more circular, sustainable healthcare futures.
Developed collaboratively by After the Single Use and the Imploding Dialysis project, Deconstructing Dialysis brought patients, healthcare professionals, researchers, industry representatives and policymakers together to explore issues of equity and sustainability in the future of haemodialysis.
Researchers from the After the Single Use project recently convened in Tanzania for a series of engagements centred around MedExpo Africa. These activities highlighted the strong, ongoing partnership between the project's established Tanzania-based unit - including researchers at the Amani Medical Research Centre, NIMR-Tanzania, and Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) — and colleagues from the U.K. and Norway.
An open call for eight artists to join research teams across eight global locations to explore plastic, healthcare and the possibilities of a more circular future.
At HSS 2026, two linked Plastic Amnesias panels explored how evidence of plastic harms, reusable technologies and material alternatives has been repeatedly obscured or forgotten across medicine and global health.
How and why have disposable plastics been valued in global healthcare and what examples exist of alternative paths not taken?
How are disposable medical technologies produced, transported, consumed, and discarded, and what relations and inequities are generated across their lifecycles?
How are researchers, policymakers, activists, engineers, and designers working together to build sustainable healthcare solutions?
