Healthcare, pollution and plastic: Alice Street at Aarhus Symposium

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After the Single Use researcher Alice Street presented her paper, 'Pushing plastics: global health humanitarianism and permissible pollution in Papua New Guinea', at 'The Anthropology of Plastics: Ontologies, Socio-Materialities, Political Ecologies' symposium, held at the University of Aarhus.

The informal symposium, organised by colleagues Gauri Pathak and Aarti Laktar, brought together researchers to discuss ongoing work on anthropological approaches to plastics. Contributors included members of the After the Single Use team, including Cat Acheson and Dani Farrow.

Street’s paper explored what it means to consider healthcare itself as a site of pollution. Drawing on ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea, she examined rural health facilities as spaces where medical waste predominantly single-use plastics is accumulated, burned, and stored.

Building on existing work on hospitals as sites of waste generation, the paper expanded the analytical focus beyond patient care and institutional governance to consider the chemically mediated relationships between healthcare systems, environments, and communities. In doing so, it reframed health facilities as “more-than-biomedical” spaces, shaped not only by care practices but also by the ecological consequences of waste.

The research also revisited earlier ethnographic fieldwork through a reflexive approach, re-examining archival materials to identify overlooked relationships between materials, infrastructures, and environments. This process highlighted how plastic medical waste participates in broader histories of global health, inequality, and environmental harm.

By foregrounding the toxic materialities of healthcare, the paper raised critical questions about how pollution, infrastructure, and colonial histories intersect within contemporary medical systems.