Print Friendly and PDF
Healthcare coverage graphic 2021

The year in sustainable healthcare reporting

53,000 stories, give or take, with a focus on Covid, PPE and carbon emissions.

Let's take a look back at media coverage in 2021 on sustainable healthcare.


We promise, in 2022, to get more sophisticated in these analyses. But even a rough cut at the data yields some pleasant surprises.

For starters, our search of the LexisNexis database found 53,000 articles touching on sustainability and healthcare. The database picks up a lot of press releases and trade articles, so the number of "mainstream" reported articles that, say, our researchers at EHN.org would aggregate is considerably smaller.

Healthcare coverage, 2021 edition

All healthcare stories on sustainability 2021

Still, within that pile we can find some insight. Our system sorted those articles into different clusters, based on an AI scan of the article text and coded by color, then plotted on a timeline.

That colorful graph is shown above. The x-axis shows the months of the year, while the y-axis shows the number of stories published. Several trends are apparent.

Healthcare manufacturing & materials

healthcare manufacturing & materials stories

The teal blocks at the base of each bar show stories focused on sustainable manufacturing and materials – about 15 percent of the coverage. That coverage was fairly consistent over the year.

Covid-19 waves

Healthcare COVID coverage

That's not the case for stories about healthcare systems getting swamped by Covid-19, right above the teal, in red blocks.

Note, of course, that this is just the fraction of the stories published about Covid overrunning our health system; what's pictured above are just those stories that that also mention sustainability or plastics or recycling.

Whether even these belong in this analysis is debatable, but what's sobering is that we saw just a brief, one-month ebb in the tsunami of coverage this issue generated – in June, when vaccines were rolling out and we all thought we had this pandemic licked.

Sigh.

These stories represent about 14 percent of all the sustainability coverage.

Healthcare climate emissions

healthcare climate coverage

Far more positive are the purple blocks, showing stories about healthcare's carbon footprint, and – two blocks above those – the peach ones showing efforts to reduce healthcare's carbon emissions.

Note the big spike in coverage in November, when nations gathered in Glasgow for the UN climate talks (You may recall that some 50 nationsbut not the United States! – pledged to reduce healthcare emissions).

Together these two blocks are about 20 percent of total sustainable healthcare coverage in 2021.

Healthcare waste & recycling

healthcare waste recycling coverage

Two final nodes deserve mention: The light green and yellow blocks between the two climate-related ones. They show stories focused on healthcare waste and recycling, respectively, and together they represent almost a quarter of the coverage – a number we at EHN.org found surprising.

We'll be out in 2022 with reports and analyses breaking apart the myth of recycling. But the attention the sector is giving to waste – and the attention that focus is getting in the media – is worth noting.

That's a quick look at the media landscape, and an imprecise one; again, our goal is to get you more detail over this next year and to do what we can to increase the volume and depth of coverage – so we have more stories to analyze when we do this again at the end of 2022!

Happy New Year!

Subscribe to our healthcare newsletter, Code Green

Get our Code Green newsletter in your inbox - FREE!

A bi-weekly newsletter for people who care about reimagining health care, sustainably.
Better than coffee.

Become a donor
Today's top news
From our newsroom

Get phthalates, parabens out of the bathroom drawer to reduce breast cancer risk: Study

Women who switched to paraben- and phthalate- free shampoos, lotions, soaps and deodorants had fewer cancer-associated changes to breast tissue cells.

LISTEN: Robbie Parks on climate justice and mental health

“It’s not just moving people around that’s going to solve public health disasters.”

WATCH: Are plastics a threat to national security?

Pete Myers explores the troubling link.

Every stage of plastic production and use is harming human health: Report

New report recommends the United Nations Global Plastics Treaty significantly reduce plastic use through aggressive bans and caps, and closer examination of toxic ingredients.

WATCH: The aftermath of the East Palestine, Ohio, toxic train derailment

Beyond Plastics captures the personal stories of residents and call for a federal ban on vinyl chloride.