Courtesy of
Close Authorship
When Jodi Sherman first started working in hospitals, she was struck by the amount of plastic used on a daily basis. She wondered how single-use plastics could be consistent with the Hippocratic oath’s first principle to do no harm. It’s clear that these materials come from somewhere and they go somewhere and they must be causing harm, says Sherman, an anesthesiologist at Yale New Haven Hospital and founding director of the Program on Healthcare Environmental Sustainability at the Yale Center for Climate Change and Health.
But not all of her colleagues and patients see it that way, because plastic is an embedded feature of patient care. According to the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council, 20–25 percent of all hospital waste in the United States is plastic amounting to more than 1 million tons annually.
What Comes After This Plastic-Filled Pandemic? yesmagazine.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yesmagazine.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Is Healthcare Pollution Making Us Ill?
Pollution from the healthcare industry disproportionally impacts the lives of people of color. Our columnist explores how we can heal the Earth and ourselves.
April 16, 2021
April 16, 2021
Earth Day is upon us, and as I sit with my daughter and color paper replicas of the planet in blues and greens, I can’t help but think about the ways the United States’ treatment of the Earth impacts our health as Black folks living in America.
What I already knew: air pollution is the fourth greatest overall risk factor for poor health worldwide (slotting behind only high blood pressure, dietary risks, and smoking). It kills a whopping 18,000 people a day. But before it kills you, it opens the door to chronic illnesses like lung cancer and asthma. We’ve long known that people of color in the United States carry a higher pollution burden than our white counterparts it’s 1.28 times the burden of the overall population. For Black folks like me, it�