Can an emerging movement cure health care facilities of environmental ills?
Employees at Toronto General Hospital were cleaning out a little-used research lab in a wing slated for renovations when they made a grisly discovery in one of the freezers reserved for test subjects: 20 human heads. “Actually, they were half heads. You could see all the soft tissue,” Ed Rubinstein clarifies during a recent stroll through the corridors of TGH. “I didn’t try matching them up, so who knows? Maybe it was just ten heads.” Either way, as the man in charge of waste disposal for the University Health Network—which includes three Toronto hospitals— it fell to the 36-year-old to properly discard the strange trash in accordance with laws governing biomedical refuse. As such waste could potentially contain infectious pathogens harmful to humans it must be put into its own stream for eventual incineration. He started by asking around the hospital to find who had, quite literally, lost their heads. But he soon discovered it was “one of those ‘they’re not mine’ situations.” When nob
