Plastic Pollution Is Everywhere

Plastics are everywhere in healthcare, nowhere more than in cancer care. An oncology nurse’s day is punctuated by numerous plastic products. A person living with cancer similarly relies on plastics—both those products that they see and those they do not—throughout cancer care. As global citizens, we are all increasingly aware of research that reveals how plastic pollution harms human health and damages all life on the planet.1 Critically, evidence now suggests that exposure to microplastics, a common form of plastic pollution with health effects both known and unknown, may even be at play in tumorigenesis.2 Plastic pollution is clearly a health crisis, one that requires our urgent action in our roles as nurses, scientists, and concerned citizens of our societies and the world. All research exists in a larger political and sociocultural context. As of this writing, the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution is contending with stalled efforts to achieve agreement on the proposed international plastic treaty.3 Meanwhile, nurses and the broader healthcare workforce in most countries are being exhorted to limit use of plastics, manage plastic waste more effectively, and implement zero-plastic approaches to meeting healthcare needs where possible.1,4 These calls to reduce plastics in healthcare prompt me to think about current and future cancer nursing research. Our future research can and must contribute to changing practices in cancer care that worsen plastic pollution. Effectively caring for people living with and after cancer must also include caring for the planet on which we all live. Potential research topics that merge plastics into our existing science and foster new areas for investigation are easily defined given some perspective and useful tools. Life cycle analysis (LCA), a technique for assessing the environmental, social, and economic impacts of any product from manufacturing through use and disposal, is an important tool in this regard.5 Marrying LCA with familiar approaches from quality improvement provides ways to integrate plastic pollution into our specialty’s research agenda. Research, led by cancer nurses, is needed to improve use of existing products, develop new ones, and study how changes in products shape better outcomes for patients and the environment. We need to reconsider clinical phenomena, questioning needs for and impacts of plastics. Among ideas useful in generating such research are the following: Misuse and overuse of plastic products like bundled clinical supplies and disposable gloves is common across healthcare. Research into factors contributing to and consequences of inappropriate glove use and discarding supplies from bundles will reveal much more than cost savings. Studying how not using disposable gloves except in certain clinical situations can put a new spin on studies of patients’ perceptions of touch and compassion. Self-care research gains power when we investigate how people living with cancer and their care partners can also avoid using plastic products like gloves and disposable bed pads at home. Economic analyses of minimizing plastic waste and promoting appropriate disposal of unavoidable waste are sure to garner attention across all sectors of healthcare. Collaboration with colleagues, including those in engineering, and using materials that replace plastics—from the familiar (think of metals and silicone, for instance) to the unexpected (an example would be fungal mycelium)—opens a gold mine of innovative product development strategies to explore. Humans’ use of plastics within and beyond healthcare has changed the environment forever. Ironically, plastic waste is a possible culprit in causing the very disease that drives our research—cancer.2 We must help break the malignant cycle of plastic use from waste to organismal and environmental damage to carcinogenesis that circles back to plastic materials and supplies used in cancer treatment and care by conducting visionary research. Our research should recognize the permanent changes that plastics have produced and mitigate this pollution crisis. Cancer nursing researchers must step forward with a clear vision, an effective plan for research, and a shared promise to do all that we can to care for both people and the planet.