Gen Z Is Rescuing Millions in Medical Supplies

This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful

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In early August, a freight truck pulled up to an OhioHealth facility in Columbus and took roughly 30,000 pounds of N95 masks and hot-and-cold packs, all boxed, sealed and stamped with expiration dates still a year or two out. Left alone, the estimated $250,000 worth of medical supplies would eventually have been thrown away, deemed unlikely to be required before their use-by date. Instead, the pallets were loaded and driven off toward Pittsburgh, the first leg of a journey to an under-resourced clinic on another continent.

The operation was part of Project MedBridge, a medical redistribution initiative set up by 16-year-old Ben Kurian, a junior at Olentangy Liberty High School in Powell, Ohio. The idea started, as a lot of good ideas do, at the dinner table. His mother is a nurse practitioner and his family friends are doctors and nurses. Over and over he heard the same uncomfortable fact — every year, big hospitals like OhioHealth and Cardinal Health discard thousands of pounds of good quality supplies simply because they won’t be used before their expiration date passes, a problem greatly exacerbated by the pandemic-driven overstock.

“These are perfectly usable, sterile supplies,” Kurian says. “They don’t come out of the box, and yet no one is putting them to use, despite the fact that there are clinics with little-to-no resources in desperate need.” When he learned that the Carnegie Young Leaders Program funds exactly the kind of social impact idea he had in mind, Kurian started cold-emailing distributors that route surplus overseas, and eventually the Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Brother’s Brother Foundation stepped in to handle shipping.

Project MedBridge only started this year, but Kurian is far from alone in his desire to curb excess medical waste. Most of the established medical supply redistribution organizations, or MSROs, like Project C.U.R.E. and World Medical Relief (WMR), are staffed full-time by adults operating at industrial scale. But around the country, a quiet network of young people has taken up the same cause: pulling medical surplus out of the waste stream and redirecting it toward people who need it, both in faraway countries and at underserved U.S. clinics. What’s striking about this newer wave is that it’s run entirely by students, and almost entirely by volunteers — teenagers and Gen Z youth squeezing warehouse shifts in between classes and exams to right a wrong they see unfolding on their own doorsteps.

Each group has found its own way to do it. United2Heal, founded at the University of Michigan in 2007 and run by undergraduates, works hand-in-glove with WMR. Every Saturday, over a hundred members meet up — some arriving by 6 a.m. — to check expiration dates and sort through each shipment. 

“Anyone who wants to come volunteer with us can,” says Leah Beel, president of the nonprofit and a junior majoring in molecular, cellular and developmental biology. The only real limitation, she says, is how many students have cars, as they all carpool to WMR’s offices 40 minutes or so from the university.

The post Gen Z Is Rescuing Millions in Medical Supplies appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

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