Revaluing plastics in health care: Alice Street at HEAT 2025

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In 2025, After the Single Use researcher Alice Street presented her paper, 'After the single use: Revaluing plastics in health care' as part of the panel 'Heath(care) derivatives as hazardous waste: New understandings of chemical infrastructures and disease control paradigms in (global) health' at the Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT) conference.

Her presentation examined how, over the past sixty years, plastic polymers and additives have become embedded as a critical chemical infrastructure within global healthcare systems. These systems increasingly rely on just-in-time supply chains for single-use devices, including dressings, gloves, diagnostic tools, and surgical instruments.

However, growing evidence of the environmental and health impacts of plastics, alongside their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, is prompting renewed scrutiny of this model. Street’s paper explored the “hidden costs” of a healthcare system built on disposability, raising questions for manufacturers, clinicians, and policymakers alike.

Drawing on historical and ethnographic research conducted across eight countries, the paper presented a moral history of medical plastics. It traced how these materials became normalised and largely insulated from critique, and how they are now increasingly understood not only as life-saving tools but also as chemically active and environmentally persistent substances.

By examining this shift, from stable objects to “leaky” materials, Street’s work highlights the contested values shaping contemporary healthcare, and the emerging possibilities for reimagining medical systems beyond single-use practices.