Plastic essentiality and forgotten sterilisation infrastructures

Body

At HSS 2026, Dani Farrow presented ‘Plastic Essentiality: How a Process of Forgetting Locked Healthcare Facilities into Single-Use Plastic Infrastructures’ as part of Plastic Amnesias II, chaired by Anne Kveim Lie.

A resistance movement against single-use plastics is underway within healthcare facilities in Scotland. Single-use products are framed as harmful to people and planet, as well as morally ‘wasteful’. Pilots switching single-use for reusable alternatives span grassroots to national initiatives. Yet an oft-cited barrier to effecting change at scale is the absence of decontamination and sterilisation services and expertise. A single sterile laundry remains operational in Scotland, serving just one small health board. All other health boards are locked-in to a reliance on single-use plastics to meet their need for sterile textiles. Frequent failures in instrument sterilisation equipment challenge the resilience of reusable sterilisation infrastructures. Yet not all that long ago, hospital services offered the only means of decontamination and sterilisation.

Where did these infrastructures, and the knowledge that underpinned them, go? Why were they – seemingly so easily – foregone? And how might mapping the forgotten work of sterilisation shape our understanding of how plastics expanded, embraced by hospitals to displace existing infrastructures and practices?

The presentation mapped these forgotten infrastructures; through understanding how and why they faded it offers insights into how they can be reintegrated and revalued asserting their own essentiality in response to the artificial lock-in created by single-use plastics.

Read more on the double panel at HSS: here.