Joining the Forces of Policy, Green Teams, and Chemistry to Build a Sustainable Healthcare System in a Post-Covid World

By: Molly Tipping

In global discussions of environmental sustainability targets, the healthcare sector is an often-overlooked area for improvement. In the U.S., the manufacturing of healthcare products is estimated to account for 8.5% of the country’s annual carbon emissions (“Health Care’s Climate Footprint,” 2019; Eckelman et al., 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic’s unprecedented demand for single-use plastics (SUPs) and personal protective equipment (PPE) counteracted emerging SUP reduction initiatives (“Advancing Sustainable Materials,” 2020) and resulted in an estimated 500% increase in medical plastic waste (8.85 million tons by the end of 2020, Shams et al., 2021). This COVID-driven spike is by no means a temporary obstacle in a transition to a more sustainable future, as current models predict no notable decline in annual global plastic waste by 2050 (Rai et al., 2023). The U.S. healthcare system, which relies on mostly non-recyclable SUPs that are hazardous to both the environment and humans, should recognize that our PPE-littered post-COVID world necessitates environmentally sustainable healthcare systems. A joint effort between global leaders, individual hospitals, and scientists is required to organize sustainable economies and strengthen the dependability of renewable materials. 

The most foundational prerequisite to a sustainable healthcare system is a government-led shift away from the prevailing linear economy (LE) towards a circular economy (CE) (Sharma et al., 2021).

The hallmark of the LE is the single-use, “cradle-to-grave” nature of products. PPE, for example, is composed of rarely recycled polymers (Kahlert and Bening, 2020), and in 2020, it is estimated that only 4.25% of PPE in the U.S. was recycled, a 50% decrease compared to 2018. The remaining ~8.6 million tons of PPE were combusted, landfilled, or illegally dumped. These disposal methods each contribute to various forms of pollution; in 2020, a pandemic-attributed 70% increase in marine plastic waste was detected during ocean cleanups (Shams et al., 2021). COVID’s ability to overwhelm proper healthcare waste disposal procedures (Benson et al., 2021) illustrates the necessity for a CE, which employs “cradle-to-cradle” production (Figure 1). In a CE, products are designed for repeated use and then recycled into new recyclable products, in contrast to a SUP-reliant LE.