Jean Thompson

Most of the plastic in your medicine cabinet is high-quality, medical grade — and devilishly difficult to safely dispose of, let alone recycle.The sorting equipment at standard recycling centers typically can’t handle small items, and wishfully including them only prolongs the sorting process that then increases the recyclers’ costs without salvaging the plastic. Some at-home medical products, like needles that have come into contact with bodily fluids, should not even be relegated to household trash.Governments and big pharmacy chains offer some guidance. For example, New York state’s Department of Environmental Conservation has a map of collection boxes for safely disposing…

The first time Dr. Peter Hackett saw a patient with frostbite, the man died from his wounds. It was in Chicago in 1971, and the man had gotten drunk and passed out in the snow, his fingers so frozen that gangrene eventually set in.Dr. Hackett later worked at Mount Everest Basecamp, on Denali, Alaska, and now in Colorado, becoming expert in treating cold-weather injury. The experience was often the same: There was not much to do about frostbite, except rewarm the patient, give aspirin, amputate in severe cases and, more often, wait and accept that six months later the patient’s…