Capitalism, COVID-19, and Climate Change
Introduction
The connection between waste, climate change, capitalism, and infectious diseases, including the COVID-19 pandemic, may not seem obvious at first, but this paper will identify the complex interplay of this relationship through a sociological perspective, which “assumes that humans are part of the environment and that the environment and society can only be fully understood in relation to each other”, using the COVID-19 pandemic as the timely and illustrative primary case study (McCarthy & King 2009) . Medical waste generated from infectious disease prevention is the ultimate double edged-sword: harming the environment but protecting humans from harmful infectious diseases including COVID-19. Further, climate change has exacerbated pandemics, epidemics, and infectious disease outbreaks, furthering the need for disposable personal protective equipment (PPE) which degrades the environment. All of us alive today have now lived through a life-changing and world-altering pandemic, we are also continually engaging with a life-changing and world-altering climate crisis, and these things are often talked about in vacuums when really, they are relational and corollary. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw every part of our lives shift and grind to a halt in many ways, including the economy. Now that COVID-19 rates are stabilizing and vaccination rates are rising, economic recovery is on the minds of many, but at what cost? I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic and the factors that may have contributed to its emergence point to an association between climate change and infectious diseases that is abetted by modern free market capitalism.
Case Analysis
It is worth noting that there are a myriad of endemics, epidemics, and outbreaks that are linked to various climate change phenomena aside from COVID-19 and that this is only increasing with time: El nino/La nina oscillations can be correlated with flu epidemics in the US and europe; malaria rates are overall decreasing but conditions for transmission are getting more favorable in more places due to climate change; droughts often cause various outbreaks due to people storing water for long periods of time in shadows resulting in pathogens growing and infecting the water (Flahault, de Castaneda, and Bolon 2016). The public health implications of climate change are worth serious and urgent consideration and action. COVID-19 will be the emphasis of this paper though.
Looking at bats in Southeast Asia (SEA), Afelt, Frutos, and Devaux (2018) examined the anthropization of environments, along with the impact of population growth (discussed below) and the corollary risks of bat-borne diseases, specifically coronaviruses (CoV). They warned that while the physiology and biology of the diseases and transmission of the diseases from the bats to pets or humans hadn’t changed (it hadn’t gotten more susceptible), what had changed was the rate at which people were coming into contact with bats due to the way their communities and homes (both the people’s and the bat’s) were set up. They looked at deforestation, or more specifically, anthropization. Due to a combination of evolving land-use patterns, deforestation, and population growth, increasing bat numbers and diversity of species were seen to be setting up their nests closer and closer to humans, attracted by a variety of suitable food sources (ie insects, fruits, etc) and dwellings (barns, orchards, etc) for various species of bats. This effect became so powerful that one study found bats in China clustering by region, rather than by species as you would normally expect to find them clustering (Afelt, Frutos, and Devaux 2018).
This created an anthropized environment: “anthropized rural environments are characterized by a wide diversity of landscapes comprising houses, barns, fields, orchards, and woods of differing densities. The common belief is that deforestation and anthropization will lead to the disappearance of species. This is not always true and anthropized environments can provide an acceptable habitat for a large range of bat species, generating thus a higher diversity of bats and in turn of bat-borne viruses next to human dwellings.” (Afelt, Frutos, and Devaux 2018). When writing, in 2018, the transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans had not been realized of course, but even then, they recognized that the human-made conditions that increased human-bat contact “poses a significant threat for the future” (Afelt, Frutos, and Devaux 2018); unfortunately, we all know that this is a real risk for an outcome similar to the Covid pandemic.
Even before the pandemic, but especially during and since, “Health care is increasingly transitioning away from durable, reusable equipment to single-use plastic devices. In addition to personal protective equipment (masks, protective gowns, and gloves), everyday items such as blood pressure cuffs, catheters, complex surgical instruments, and even bed linens, pillows, and patient gowns are laden with plastic and commonly thrown out after a single patient encounter. Several factors contribute to this rapid transition to disposables including industry-manufactured obsolescence to sell more services, perceived cost benefits, convenience, and cultural norms” (Smith, Singh, Sherman, 2023).
98% of plastics come from fossil fuels, making up 3.7% of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change; “while healthcare contributes nearly 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and consumes substantial quantities of plastics, efforts to reduce the use of plastics in health care has been largely absent” (Smith, Singh, Sherman, 2023). The COVID-19 pandemic sent us, individually and collectively, into survival mode and we paradoxically ended up working against our own survival by contributing so heavily to plastic pollution through personal protective equipment. The situation became dire in ecological terms at the height of the pandemic when “single-use face mask production in China soared to 116 million per day in February [2020], about 12 times the usual quantity (2)” (Sills, Adyel 2020). This potential waste emission was so great that “If the global population adheres to a standard of one disposable face mask per day after lockdowns end, the pandemic could result in a monthly global consumption and waste of 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves (4)” (Sills, Adyel 2020). We do have other options though. Reusable personal protective equipment exists, is effective for some instances, and even acted as a “critical solution to pandemic supply-chain shortages” (Smith, Singh, Sherman 2023).
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, a second phenomenon was occurring at the same time as the huge additions of plastic waste emissions through PPE being released into the environment – the global demand for fossil fuels dropped and so too their prices, making it cheaper to make new plastics than recycling. Recycling is often only practiced when it is profitable. While there are many barriers to making reusable medical device, there are few barriers to making single-use medical devices, chiefly, economic and procedural barriers: “For a manufacturer to bring a medical device to market with a “reusable” label, it provides data demonstrating to FDA’s [Food & Drug Administration] satisfaction that the device can be cleaned and disinfected or sterilized without impairing its function. However, the ‘single-use’ label is self-designated by manufacturers, not FDA. Thus, a device may be labeled as single-use because the manufacturer believes it cannot be reliably used more than one or because the manufacturer chooses not to conduct studies needed to demonstrate to the FDA that it is reusable” (Smith, Singh, Sherman 2023) In many cases, it is less expensive to label a product single-use and let it become waste than conduct the studies to verify its reusability. However, not all hope is lost because some of these discarded “so-called” single-use items are sterilized and sold back to hospitals as “FDA-approved ‘reprocessed’ medical devices” (smith, Singh, Sherman 2023). It follows that significantly more investment and (financial) incentive should be put into programs that recycle or reprocess so-called single use product safely because while it’s true that some products need to be single use for safety and sterility, not all do, and “broad-scale, unfettered, and irrational adoption of disposable items in the name of infection prevention is harmful, unsustainable, and unacceptable” (Smith, Singh, Sherman 2023). Since it is the financial and procedural burden of demonstrating reusability that often stands in the way of getting reusable products on the market (rather than the products actual reusability), strong financial incentives for recycling would be an equitable and functionable counterbalance.
Image is a used and discarded mask washed up on a beach
Discussion
Aflet et al (2018) attribute a strong link between population growth and human contact with bat-borne diseases, including CoVs, as do many attribute the ecological problem to the problem of population growth. Schnaiberg & Gould (2009) find this incomplete though. For Scheiber & Gould (2009), the role of population growth is tangential in that developing nation’s populations are exploited for labor to meet growing production needs as technology expands, while reaping very few benefits and facing most of the dangers of increased ecological degradation, including handling developed nation’s waste. While population growth does pose an ecological threat globally, it is not the root of the issue. Schnaiberg & Gould (2009) find a more robust answer in the framework they call “the treadmill of production...which requires ever more energy and resources and causes industrial and consumer wastes to be constantly generated.” The treadmill of production is built around two processes, the expansion of technology and the dominance of economic preferences over all else, including environmental or social considerations. There is “a tension [that] exists within industrial systems, especially but not exclusively in capitalistic ones” (Schimberg & Gould 2009) This tension arises from the domination of economic preferences over ecological considerations as well as the separation of humans from the environment. The rhetoric of the treadmill of production is an individualism that emphasizes that we are all cogs in a machine that must continue to grow, produce more, and create more consumption without consideration for the waste that results, especially because that waste becomes somebody else’s problem, somewhere else. According to this perspective, “capitalist production, by its very nature, is at odds with efforts to clean up or improve the environment” (McCarthy & King 2009).
Technological changes played a key role in the maintenance of the treadmill of production, the expansion of production, and subsequently of waste. In particular, transportation is critical for the operation of the treadmill of production. When we saw shut-downs throughout the transportation system due to COVID-19, it halted the entire production system. One role of government is to police and maintain the relationship of the economic structure to the ecological disruption that necessarily occurs from the extraction and exploitation of production; in addition, government should also act as a mediator between workers and capital owners/investors. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic we saw this play out with the US government issuing relief checks to citizens and subsidies to corporations in order to quell any discontentment while the treadmill was not functioning.
Importantly, not everyone experienced the pandemic the same and not everyone experiences environmental harms equally. Examining the structural and historical forces that contribute which continue to create such inequities is useful in understanding the contemporary issue.
David Pellow (2009), in a case study of the WMX recycling, recounts the gruesome conditions sanitation workers face. He points out that, a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, “Medical waste has recently emerged as a significant problem because, as hospital patients are more frequently sent home under managed care, so is their waste. Garbage and recycling workers are regularly exposed to these substances” (Pellow 2009). With more people being sent home from the hospital to make room for COVID-19 patients, this could foreseeably create an influx of hazardous waste in these recycling management plants. We also know that it is mostly low-income and BIPOC people who occupy these positions, raising issues on inequality (Pellow 2009).
Recycling plant workers who are tasked with dealing with our waste face a number of risks on the job, due particularly to medical waste: “Finger and arm pricks by syringes and hypodermic needles and battery acid sprays are becoming quite in MRFs around the world... Needle pricks are particularly worrisome, as many employees exposure to HIV” (Pellow 2009). Infectious diseases, including COVID-19, exacerbate and complicate this risk. When you don’t know if something you touch could be contaminated it’s extremely difficult to do your job; and in the early stages of an outbreak, epidemic, or pandemic when we, as a society, are still learning about how pathogens spread, sanitation workers are often unknowingly exposed to diseases. Powerful social and structural forces come together such that “These psychological and physical hazards intermingled as people desperate for gainful employment and job security continued working in the face of gross health and safety violations” (Pellow 2009). Under the logic of the treadmill of production, we saw many workers putting their lives on the line for both essential and non-essential jobs because they didn’t know how they would survive otherwise. We also saw a real cultural restlessness to get the economy going again, nervous about the consequences that would ensue every minute that it sat stagnant. This restlessness was also laden with a carelessness for fellow humans as well as the environment, putting workers in danger of contracting COVID-19 and returning to the “status-quo” of ecological extraction and degradation. This evokes issues of environmental (in)justice, which, according to Bullard (2003), has three two tenents: “(1) all individuals have the right to be protected from environmental protection, and (2) prevention is the preferred strategy: eliminating the threat before harm occurs.” This approach to environmental care is known as the “Precautionary Principle;” it asks how much harm can be avoided rather than how much may be tolerable (Bullard, 2003). The dominant societal paradigm does not operate under the Precautionary Principle but instead continually pushes the bounds of how much harm is tolerable, putting the onus on those harmed by pollution and degradation to prove their harm (often very difficult to do without proof of intent to harm). In the context of COVID-19, we saw that we have an immovable object (COVID-19) and an unstoppable force (waste produced from COVID-19) and our response was to try to move the object any way possible with whatever harm was tolerable. There wasn’t a concern for limiting the amount of waste to the least harmful amount possible because there was a perspective issue because the harm we were seeing all around us was immediate and close; the harm that was coming from the massive influx of waste was longer-term and further away. However, has we operated under the Precautionary Principle during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is possible that some of the environmental degradation would have been mitigated and lives down the line saved, all the while saving lives at the present still.
Moreover, “while these hazards are both physical and psychological in their impact, they originate in social structures” and more specifically they originate in the treadmill of production which is global free market capitalism (Pellow 2009). There is much debate over the origins of COVID-19. There are likely a number of factors, and while there has not been an animal reservoir identified, related viruses have been identified in bats in the area where COVID-19 originated (Temmam et al. 2022). Aflet et al (2018) also found that humans were coming into contact with CoVs much more frequently due to anthropized environments. Taken together, from the sociological perspective, the hazards the sanitation workers face from the influx of waste from personal protective equipment and COVID-19 itself are as much originating from social organizations as they are from biological disease processes. They originate from the ways our communities and homes are set up, in the case of anthropized environments, and in the case of the structure of our waste management systems and who is responsible for dealing with waste. It is for this reason that “Environmental sociologists contend that environmental problems are inextricably linked to societal issues” and vice versa (McCarthy & King 2009).
The treadmill of production has a priorities problem: “At the regional and national levels, prioritization of human health over environmental health has led to the delay or reversal of policies aiming to reduce single-use plastic” (Sills & Aydel 2020). Conversely, and more in line with the sociological perspective of this essay, “The ‘One Health” concept recognizes that human health is connected to animal health and to the environment” (Afelt, Frutos, and Devaux 2018). Capitalism requires the separation of humans from nature and the environment in order to dominate, extract, and exploit nature. If we weren’t separated from nature and the environment we wouldn’t be able to kill it as easily. We’ve entirely re-written the human/nature relationship on capitalism's terms and now “our lack of understanding about the human/nature relationship has led to some of our worst environmental problems... and has limited our ability to solve those problems” (McCarthy & King 2009). This separation of humans from the environment also separates us from one another and from our human-ness.
Conclusion
Urgent and collective action toward reducing plastic pollution is necessary wherever possible. In order to do this, we must shift our logic from prioritizing economic preferences over all else to consider ecological incentives. Not all medical products or devices can be reused but it is the default logic of the treadmill of production to assume that it’s easier to let them turn into waste than make them reusable. Reconnection of humans with nature and the environment will go a long way in shifting this logic.
Finally, The sociological perspective offers a powerful balance to the natural sciences by emphasizing social structures, institutions, cultures, norms, and human behavior (McCarthy & King 2009). It has been a critical tool to dismantle hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality. However, at times sociologists have been hesitant to go outside the discipline to explore human/nature topics, which is why there is a great need for more study of topics like this one. The application of the natural sciences to the sociological perspective added depth, clarity, and grounding to the theoretical.
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