KULeuven Lecture Series: Talking Trash — The Rise of Throwaway Medical Culture in the Age of Plastics by Bruno Strasser

Talking Trash: The Rise of Throwaway Medical Culture in the Age of Plastics
In the 1950s, Western medicine began to embrace single-use medical devices such as masks, gloves, syringes, and catheters. Within just two decades, this “throwaway” culture, rooted in the modernist appeal of plastics, transformed hospital care. It took the COVID-19 pandemic for the tremendous environmental impact, supply vulnerabilities, and economic costs of this transition to become fully visible. Why, then, did disposable products replace reusable ones?

Drawing on published advertisements, corporate archives, and hospital management journals, this paper shows how industry actors and hospital managers constructed disposable devices as inherently safer, cheaper, and more convenient than reusable ones. Industry was driven by the promise of continuous profits, while hospital managers were motivated by ideals of simplified logistics and reduced labor costs. Resistance to throwaway medicine in the 1960s and 1970s—largely forgotten today—offers valuable resources for rethinking more sustainable medical practices in the future.

Bruno Strasser
Bruno J. Strasser is a historian of science, technology, and medicine. He is a full professor at the University of Geneva and an affiliate of the History of Medicine at Yale University. His most recent book, The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (Yale University Press, 2025), co-authored with Thomas Schlich, was included on Nature’s list of “ten essential reads” of 2025. He has previously published on the history of big data (Collecting Experiments: Making Big Data Biology, University of Chicago Press, 2019) and on public participation in science. He is currently working on the history of occupational health and disposable medical culture.

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