Talking Trash: The Rise of Throwaway Medical Culture

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After the Single Use researcher Bruno Strasser presented ‘Talking Trash — The Rise of Throwaway Medical Culture in the Age of Plastics’ at the Leuven Centre for Health Humanities.

The lecture examined the rapid rise of single-use medical devices in Western medicine from the 1950s onwards, including masks, gloves, syringes and catheters. Within two decades, disposable products had begun to transform hospital care, reshaping clinical routines, infection control practices, supply chains and expectations around safety, sterility and efficiency.

Strasser explored why disposable products came to replace reusable ones, situating this shift within the wider modernist appeal of plastics and the growth of twentieth-century throwaway culture. The lecture also considered how the COVID-19 pandemic made the consequences of this transition more visible.

By tracing the historical emergence of disposable medical culture, the presentation connected directly with After the Single Use’s wider research into how single-use plastics became embedded in healthcare systems, and how these systems might now be rethought.