enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Discarded but usable medical supplies fill Elizabeth McLellan’s Portland home. McLellan, who distributes the supplies to Third World hospitals, is looking for space to store and sort them.

Elizabeth McLellan is a hoarder.

The dining room of her spacious home in Portland's West End long ago disappeared beneath mounds of white plastic trash bags. Ditto for her laundry room, her downstairs bathroom, her cellar

"There's got to be 1,000 bags in this place," McLellan said Friday, looking lost amid the piles. "This used to be my living space."

No, she's not one of those eccentrics who can't for the life of her seem to throw anything out. In fact, all of the stuff in McLellan's home was diverted from the waste stream at Maine Medical Center, where she works as a nurse administrator.

And here's the amazing part. None of it – from the unused surgical dressings to the unopened Foley catheter trays to the Betadine swabs that have yet to knock off a single germ – is really waste.

"They're 'identified medical supplies to be discarded,' " McLellan said, choosing her words carefully. "We don't want to use the word 'waste' because waste means blood it means icky. This is not icky. This is clean. Most of it is still sterile."

And all of it, sooner or later, will go to a clinic or hospital in some Third World country where a clean bandage, a never-used nipple for a baby bottle or a sterile needle and syringe are nothing short of manna from heaven.

Welcome to Partners for World Health, a nonprofit organization McLellan formed this year as part of her quest to salvage perfectly good medical supplies from Maine's hospitals and take them where they're needed most. The problem is she's drowning in the stuff and needs someplace to sort and store it – but more on that later.

McLellan's one-woman crusade to make the world a healthier place dates to the early 1990s, when she was the vice president of nursing at a state-of-the-art hospital in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Part of her job involved traveling to recruit nurses in places like Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, where many medical facilities were anything but state of the art. So before her trips, she began filling huge travel bags with supplies that had been given to patients at her hospital but never used – a symbol, if ever there was one, of the gulf that separates those in this world who have from those who have not.

"The hospitals in the big cities have the funding from the governments and other resources," McLellan said. "It's the little clinics, it's the little tiny hospital an hour and a half out of Phnom Penh "

She paused, remembering that particular trip to Cambodia.

"Oh my God, it was really amazing," she said. "They had HIV everywhere, tuberculosis everywhere and nothing, no supplies whatsoever. And it was filthy dirty."

McLellan returned to her native Maine in 1996 and went to work at Maine Medical Center in 2001. But she's remained a globetrotter at heart – she currently serves as president of the World Affairs Council of Maine – traveling to out-of-the-way places a few times a year.

And wherever she goes, she drags along as many as 20 super-sized duffle bags stuffed with medical supplies. (Most international airlines, upon hearing what she's doing, let her check the bags for free.)

How do her counterparts react when she shows up, sometimes for the second or third time, with a fresh load of supplies?

"They're absolutely floored," she said. "They're so appreciative, so thankful."

For now, almost all of the supplies come from Maine Medical Center. And that, to be honest, is where McLellan has to walk a bit of a tightrope.

Like many, she has strong feelings about the "throw-away society" in which we live. But the stuff she collects at Maine Medical Center, she stresses, is no different from that routinely flowing into landfills from hospitals all over this country – all because under our health care system,...