Environmental Question #38 [Medical Plastic Safety]

Is there research into alternatives to plastic for medical equipment?

Courtesy of Reddit user u/CaregiverNo3070

Q: As someone who donates plasma & also knows that there's been a lot of hullabaloo about micro & nano plastics, it's probably not a good thing for the tubing to be made out of plastic injecting into the bloodstream, but glass isn't practical & people can have latex allergies. i do know that there's more defenses in the body that we've recently discovered, but i would think for the more immunocompromised that wouldn't be ideal. is there any research on other materials for medical tubing? i know this is more of a medical question, but i do think about it from a materials perspective.

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A: This is a great question, and I have actually worked on medical materials for this kind of application. The short answer is yes, alternative materials are being developed for these applications, but it will be a long time before any of them get used in the real world. In the meantime though, toxin exposure from medical plastics isn't something you need to worry about.

It's important to remember that plastic isn't just one thing, there are thousands of different types of plastic and ways to manufacture it. The regulations for medical materials are EXTREMELY strict, so any new material needs to be tested very thoroughly, usually over the course of more than 10 years, before a regular patient ever comes in contact with it. The specific types of plastic used for various medical applications have been tested to death over several decades, and they are much higher quality than the plastics used for things like toys or even for food packaging. Medical plastics shed a minuscule amount of microplastics and other chemicals compared to typical consumer plastics. This also means that medical grade plastics are much more expensive than consumer grade plastics, which is a big part of why these high quality materials aren't used everywhere.

I've thought a lot about how our societies might phase out plastic over the years, and I think medical plastics will probably be some of the last plastics to be phased out if they're phased out at all. Inventing and testing new materials that can realistically replace such tried and true existing materials will take a very long time, and there are so many highly specific requirements for medical materials that in some cases usable alternatives might not exist. In my opinion this isn't really a problem, because if we can find our way to a world that doesn't waste plastic on things like throwaway packaging, and instead uses only very small amounts of plastic on highly specific and important applications like medical treatments, then I think that's a good world. The waste from that would be only a tiny fraction of what we produce today, so it would be very manageable to dispose of it responsibly.

I totally see what you're saying about concerns for immunocompromised people too. There are absolutely people in the world who have negative reactions to contact with various plastics, but medical plastics are designed so that happens to the absolute smallest number of people possible. That number is not zero, so ongoing research into alternative materials designed to be safe for those people is important, but fortunately not many people need to worry about that.