Sawyer Seminar: After the Single Use: Healthcare Waste and Environmental Justice (Jeremy Greene)

Presented by Jeremy Greene, MD, PhD (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine)

The modern medical enterprise is distinctively wasteful, but not all people pay the same price for the benefits of our single-use medical technologies. In a relatively short period of time, we have naturalized the use of single-use masks, surgical drapes, plastic syringes, surgical tools, and diagnostic tests—all wrapped in multiple layers of single-use plastics—and then forgotten there was ever any alternative.

In this talk, Jeremy Greene traces the links between local, national, and global frames of environmental justice in relation to healthcare waste. Only with attention to local historical and social context, he argues, can we work to unseat medical waste as a natural category and reconsider it as the outcome of a set of value decisions we have made in the past and can change in the future.

After the Lecture, attendees are welcome to stay for a 5:15 p.m. discussion with the guest speaker on medical humanities methodologies, translational experience in a medical setting, and multidisciplinary/multi-institutional collaboration.