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Hello, I'm James Gallagher, and welcome to the Inside Health podcast.

I've been feeling a bit under the weather recently. I might actually have my first sore throat since before the pandemic

started. So I have been feeling the pressure when it comes to my regular lateral flows.

They're all coming back negative at the moment, so I'm still here making the program. But I have noticed a mountain of plastic waste starting to build up in my bathroom bin. I've got some of the lateral flows with me here, the unused ones, obviously. And it's not hard to see why. The swabs, they come in their own bit of plastic packaging. Then you've got the test itself. That comes in like a combination of foil

and plastic packaging. Then there's all the vials that've got the little drops in as well.

There's just loads of it. And that's just me doing my tests at home. So in this inside health,

we're going to take a look at the NHS's waste problem, how the pandemic has made it worse

and what the solutions for it could be. And I don't

if you remember, that shortage of blood vials in the NHS, whatever happened to that, we'll

find out and ask the provocative question. Will we just testing too much anyway? But first,

our cardiologist, Dr. Rohan-Francis, has been assessing the mountain of plastic waste in his hospital.

I'm in the cardiac catheter lab, what cardiologists kind of call our operating theatre,

and we're waiting for an emergency case to come in, our fifth one of the day.

One of the nurses is getting all the equipment, we'll be using ready, and almost all of it is single-use plastic.

Each plastic, syringe, catheter, clip, drape, wire, stent, gloves, and so on, all come individually wrapped in plastic.

The other day, we unpacked a prosthetic heart valve, and I could scarcely believe how much plastic it

...