Could eco-friendliness be harmful to our health?
Recently I spent three weeks in Northampton General Hospital here in the UK and, having written a book about “green” issues and taken a keen personal interest in them, I was horrified to see how much perfectly recyclable stuff was just tossed into the garbage.
“Recycling? You’re joking,” said one nurse I asked about it. “We can’t take a risk with anything considering all these infectious bugs around. MRSA, C-dif, norovirus, E.coli, salmonella plus dozens more – we’ve got a good record for hygiene here and we can’t afford to take chances.”
So what happens to these otherwise perfectly recyclable items? “Incinerated,” he trumpeted. “Vaporised. Kaboom.”
And we’re not talking about clinical waste here.
What I was referring to was plastics and their many derivatives, paper, cardboard, glass … various types of packaging including wrapping from blister-packed medical equipment that at this stage had only been handled by a staff member wearing pristine, sterile gloves. And food waste … large quantities from the meal trolleys twice a day, cook-chilled and wrapped in cling film, binned and torched. A crying shame. Or so I thought.
But is our current drive towards recycling as much as we can, potentially endangering our health by exposing us to bugs our biologically-cleansed bodies just can’t cope with?
I have to admit this … when I checked out my brown food waste caddy so thoughtfully provided by our local council to enable us to recycle food waste into pig food (I think) and found it, in our recent hot weather, to be heaving with maggots, I had second thoughts. Of course, sufficiently cleaned up I’m sure maggots can be turned into useful protein for whatever animal might have the misfortune to eat it later. But maggots? Yuk. I may be old-fashioned but to me, maggots read “dirty.”
And the dear old UK Daily Mail – bless their vehement little hearts – recently ran a story saying that the eco-friendly re-usable “bag for life” shopping bags all the major supermarkets are promoting are actually repositories for an unpleasant-sounding list of evil bugs, including salmonella and E.coli. Apparently if we don’t sanitise these bags every week we could be up for intestinal infections and worse.
So in our rush to save the planet, are we setting ourselves up for infections that could kill us?
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5 Responses to Could eco-friendliness be harmful to our health?
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Oh, the Daily Mail. Never happy without a scare story … but how did they tie it in to a negative impact on house prices, I wonder?
I would contend instead that what is harmful to our health is unhealthy food raising. Factory farming is where ecoli and salmonella thrive. One sick animal in a lot of 1000 mass processed will contaminate the entire batch. Shopping for locally grown and raised food will reduce most risk of food borne illnesses.
Also, if there were maggots in the compost, then they were indeed recycling it. Yes, it's gross, but that maggots are insect larvae and they break down almost anything organic. (here's an article I found… http://www.bugspray.com/article/maggots.html)
Anyway, stand by your green practices. You're respecting the planet and your health.
I do believe the hospitals are following the “Nanny State” we seem to live in. Years ago we never had all these infections and hospitals were much cleaner and most things were used more than once. We are not opening ourselves up to infection as long as we use common sense. Hospitals are very wasteful but as long as they claim it is for “Infection Control” they can spend far more money on things that are disposable rather than re-usable but in my opinion it does not have to be this way. Most infections are brought in by Visitors not through bad handling of medical equipment.
Angie
Twitter: Angiewelly1
How did we manage when the green grocer tipped soily spuds into our raffia shopping bags, the butcher placed a piece of beef, the blood oozing through the paper wrapping on them and the baker carefully placed a cardboard box with a cream sponge inside on top? A peck of dirt before we die? We are becoming so sanitised we'll be dead before we've taken so much as a pinch. Antiseptics and antibiotics are fine, but the results of over use has resulted in super bugs.