Trego's Mountain Ear

In hospital settings, many things are used and discarded. Linens are generally washed, but the syringe we fed my baby from, once, is discarded. Gloves? Discarded, often. There’s a movement to shift away from single-use plastics, indeed, single-use items in general.

It’s intuitive. If we don’t just use things once and throw them away, of course it’s better. Less wasteful, better for the environment, more energy and cost efficient.

But it’s a tradeoff. Reusing items allows a greater risk of infection, because sanitization procedures (especially those we can do at home in the kitchen sink rather than with, say, an autoclave) are imperfect. My reusable grocery store bag is more likely to vector germs to my food than a plastic one. My reusable straw is more likely to still contain mold or other ickiness from the last time I used it for a smoothie and didn’t quite get it cleaned out fully.

Reusuable items are more likely to vector dirt or disease than single-use items. The trade-offs between the two are obvious, so the question becomes one of risk and of priority. How high is the likelihood of dirt and disease causing illness and how important is it to reduce plastic waste?