this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] dingus@lemmy.world 67 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I work in healthcare and sometimes I think about the amount of waste I generate in a day and it's wild

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 44 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Health of humans is always excluded from plastic reduction laws and for good reason.

[–] Donkter@lemmy.world 37 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 17 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] lengau@midwest.social 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dingus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

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.