this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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I work in healthcare and sometimes I think about the amount of waste I generate in a day and it's wild
Health of humans is always excluded from plastic reduction laws and for good reason.
Yes, I would rather healthcare and science used 5x as much plastic as they do already and everyone else had to go completely wasteless than try to put any undue limits on them.
Tbf, I remember the times we reused everything, even tubes.
And it was a mess and there is so much evidence that the whole process of reusing is even worse for the environment.
Plastic recycling in the home is basically a scam, but at the scale of a hospital where you're generating large amounts of the same (known) plastic that's going in its own bin, it's much easier to recycle. I just bought a bunch of recycled PET that mostly came from medical waste.
I mean, I've worked at a number of hospitals in the US and never seen a recycling receptacle for our waste. Our waste either goes in a biohazard bag to be incinerated, sharps containers to be disposed of (altho not sure in what way), or a regular trash can to presumably in a landfill.
Not sure if other countries are different, but I can't imagine they sort through our biohazard waste bags for plastic materials.