Sciences of Waste / Wastes of Science at the History of Science Society Annual Meeting 2025
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After the Single Use researcher Jeremy Greene organised and presented in the panel ‘Sciences of Waste / Wastes of Science’ at the History of Science Society Annual Meeting.
The panel formed the second of two sessions exploring the longue durée history of waste in the West, with a particular focus on the political ecology of waste in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. Across the papers, contributors examined how classifications of waste shift over time and how attitudes towards waste become shaped by moral imperatives, public health concerns, and environmental anxieties.
The session explored a range of historical contexts, from nineteenth-century hospitals where the “extravagant” use of medical supplies was framed as a moral failing, to mid-twentieth-century Pennsylvania where industrial pollution became increasingly recognised as a public health hazard. Other discussions traced how disposable medical plastics moved beyond the hospital setting into wider environmental systems, taking on new roles as both vectors of infection and sources of petrochemical toxicity.
Jeremy’s paper, ‘How to Dispose of the Disposables?’, examined the rapid expansion of hospital waste following the rise of single-use medical devices in the twentieth century. While disposables were introduced as technologies of safety and convenience, the volume of healthcare waste doubled repeatedly as hospitals became increasingly dependent on throwaway products.
Drawing on archival collections, FOIA requests, and trade journals, the paper explored how hospital managers, infection control professionals, and sanitation engineers attempted to measure, manage, and contain the growing material and environmental consequences of disposable medicine. The presentation addressed the infrastructural challenges created by medical waste and the competing understandings of risk, sanitation, and cost that emerged at the dawn of throwaway healthcare systems.
