Can plastic waste from point-of-care diagnostics be reduced?

On a blustery evening in December, 2022, we—an anthropologist and engineer, both based at UK universities—huddled on a west African beach, behind an ad-hoc windbreak of driftwood and stones, to set alight a nitrocellulose test strip we had extracted from a COVID-19 lateral flow assay (LFA). Over the course of our trip, we had learned of a substantial number of unused, expired COVID-19 tests in the region. The tests had been imported during a time of pandemic crisis, but demand for testing had since dropped and health authorities were now facing a major disposal challenge for expired or unwanted devices. With unused testing kits being kept in storage, buried, or incinerated, we were troubled by the possible health and environmental risks from their material components, including highly flammable nitrocellulose, and decided to explore the materiality of the device for ourselves: just how flammable was a test strip and what might this mean for their mass disposal? One of us held the tip of the testing strip while the other flicked the lighter.