Healthcare as a site of contestation, negotiation and resistance for global plastics governance: a guest lecture at Azim Premji University

Body

How has healthcare become a key site of debate over the future of plastics and what does this mean for efforts to address the global plastics crisis?

In this guest seminar at Azim Premji University, Dr Cat Acheson, Research Fellow with After the Single Use, will discuss how healthcare has emerged as a key site of contestation, negotiation, and resistance in attempts to tackle the plastics crisis through global governance mechanisms. The seminar will make the case for why plastics must be understood as a major global health issue in addition to an environmental problem, and why healthcare plastics in particular deserve critical attention, as they lie at the heart of contemporary tensions for sustainability. 

Plastic pollution is widely recognised as a global crisis, causing harm to environmental and human health throughout its lifecycle. Its production, circulation and disposal contribute to climate change. Chemical additives, many of which are known to be toxic to human and ecosystem health, can leach from plastic throughout this lifecycle, including during product use and waste treatment. Microplastics are also emitted at every stage, permeating environments worldwide and entering the human body. Exposure to plastic and plastic-associated chemicals is linked to cancers, reduced fertility, cardiovascular disease, asthma and neurodevelopmental disorders. Particularly vulnerable groups include children, waste pickers, Indigenous peoples and women.

Despite evidence of plastic’s harms, it is often defended as essential to economic and social development and human wellbeing, creating a barrier to changes in how it is regulated and used. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in healthcare, where single-use plastics have become synonymous with high-quality care, even while endangering patients and workers and contributing to wider harms. Healthcare has thus emerged as a principal site of contestation in ongoing negotiations for a United Nations Global Plastics Treaty. Whilst some national governments and petrochemical industry bodies use plastic’s current role in healthcare to argue against strong plastics governance, voices within the healthcare sector itself call for ambitious global action—including in healthcare—to protect patients, wider publics and the planet.