New Life for Medical Supplies: Rethinking Healthcare Waste

Seventeen years ago, as a divorced mother of three newly downsized from a leadership position at a Fortune 500 company where I was focused on eldercare health services, I traveled to Tanzania. I was hoping my visit would both clear my head and enable me to consider a new avenue of work. It didn’t take long for inspiration to strike.

In the Serengeti Plains, I met a London-based doctor volunteering at a local health clinic. She was sobbing.

She explained that while she was intending to use her skills to provide guidance there, she was unable to offer the help she had in mind due to the profound shortage of medical supplies. The clinic had no bandages, tools, or IV starter kits. Even the most basic supplies were unobtainable.

At that moment, the idea for the Afya Foundation was born. I recognized that there are times when you hear someone’s story and you are compelled to do something. As founder and CEO of Afya (which means “health” in Swahili), I set out to build a systemic method of capturing and delivering medical supplies that would otherwise go to waste and help no one.

The United States is the only country in the world where regulatory mandates — in this case, set forth by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — require any medical supplies that have been in close contact with a patient to be discarded, even if they have never been unsealed.

This unnecessary waste fills landfills with supplies that could save countless lives. It is critical to embrace an efficient method of capturing and delivering medical supplies that would otherwise go to waste and help no one. 

Working closely with vetted international and domestic partnerships to assist with the fair and widespread distribution of these supplies (which otherwise would be discarded) is one method that has already proven its extraordinary effectiveness.

Taking unused bandages, sutures, wheelchairs, incubators, and other medical supplies and resources and shipping them to communities in need around the world and throughout the United States is the goal and the intentional process. 

Supplies are delivered through three vital channels. Strengthening health systems across Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean happens by delivering customized shipments of essential medical resources. Here in the United States, the deliveries serve as a critical safety net, providing health and humanitarian supplies to community health centers, school clinics, and service organizations that care for underserved populations, with a particular focus on communities in New York. 

When disasters strike — whether natural disasters or war, such as in Ukraine now — the response is swift, working directly with local partners and existing healthcare infrastructure to rapidly deploy precisely what’s needed from the warehouse to the site and staff who are affected.

Putting these medical supplies and equipment to good use can reduce the cost to the planetand improve the healthcare outcomes of people worldwide. 

As the second largest world contributor to landfill waste, the US healthcare system creates 4.7 million pounds of medical waste annually, according to a 2024 report. The waste is a result of excess inventory, as well as unused and discarded surgical supplies and equipment.

A 2019 study published in JAMA estimated that the “total annual costs of waste in the U.S. healthcare system were $760 billion to $935 billion and savings from interventions that address waste were $191 billion to $286 billion.”

The crisis of “equipment graveyards” of abandoned medical and surgical equipment —a term usedas in a 2019 global health study — exists at a time when “[a]n estimated 4.8 billion people lack access to safe, timely and affordable surgical and anesthesia care worldwide.” 

These supply deserts exist in both low-resource and high-income areas of the world, as well as in high-conflict areas of war, crisis, homelessness, and disaster, plus in emergencies where areas are hit by hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, and other disasters. 

Solutions are available through nonprofit organizations, institutions, individuals, and healthcare entities. Donations and concerted efforts to collect these supplies and deliver them efficiently anywhere in the world are possible and successfully underway. 

For instance, in New York State, more than 16 million pounds of medical supplies destined for incineration and landfills have been diverted and put to use in countries such as Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, South Africa, Ukraine, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, as well as across the United States.

Partnering with New York University’s In Dialogue initiative, hundreds of students gathered recently to sort and create supplies inventory for Afya partners in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. The work was curative for many; as one student remarked, “For the last year, I have been searching for a place to show up for humanity and couldn’t find it anywhere. Here, I have.”

Danielle N. Butin, MPH, OTR, is the founder and CEO of the Afya Foundation, a former health executive and occupational therapist, an award-winning leader whose work has been featured in prominent media outlets, and the author of Wild Hope Now.