A discussion of single-use plastics in medical settings

Abstract

Traditional petroleum-based plastics such as polypropylene (PP) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) are commonly used in medical applications to deliver potentially life-saving treatment and ongoing healthcare to patients around the world. Unfortunately, many of these applications of plastics are single use, leading to many pieces of medical paraphernalia lying in landfill or floating in our oceans. These single-use applications are unavoidable. We propose moving to a newly invented biopolymer platform to resolve the problem.