The 2024 Robert H. Levi symposium’s organizers collaborated with the iDeas Lab to create a trailer that would introduce the symposium and explicate issues it would address. The film was the centerpiece of the symposium’s promotional efforts, shared broadly on social media, and in targeted distribution to community groups and their members, attracting over 200 attendees.
Roughly 80 percent of healthcare’s oversized carbon footprint derives from the production, transportation, use, and disposal of a single-use medical supply chain. Yet as health care organizations try to practice ‘resource stewardship’ – that is, to move away from single-use disposable items toward sustainable use of durable items – they encounter widespread perceptions that disposability is a necessary virtue in modern health care. The Berman Institute’s 2024 Robert H. Levi Symposium, “The Value(s) of Disposability in Health Care: Questioning the Tradeoffs of Safety, Efficacy, Efficiency, and Sustainability,” brought together scholars and practitioners in bioethics, clinical practice, environmental justice, practice innovation, and health policy, to explore policy pathways that harmonize clinical safety, efficacy, and efficiency with sustainability. Representatives from the South Baltimore Community Land Trust were included as panelists for the event.
“Due in large part to Johns Hopkins Healthcare, the incinerator in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood is the nation’s largest medical waste incinerator,” said the Berman Institute’s Maria Merritt, co-organizer of the symposium. “It was vitally important that the symposium included the voices of community residents impacted by those pollutants.”