Hospitals use more energy than any industry other than national defense, and 30 percent of the mercury in the environment comes from medical incinerators.
“That just doesn't make sense,” said Beth Eckl, a consultant who works with Practice Greenhealth, a group that works for environmentally sustainable health care. “We create a waste stream that in part causes the problems we're trying to cure.”
“We're not going to fix everything at once, but we are moving step by step,” said St. Pat's Beth Schenk.
Hospitals, by their nature, are garbage-producing behemoths. Sterile instruments that come wrapped in near-infinite layers of plastic, all manner of items soaked in blood and bodily fluids, pharmaceuticals, mercury and dioxin-releasing plastics are just part of the problem.
Hospitals, open all day and night, also consume huge amounts of energy, the production of which causes all manner of other environmental problems.
“Medical care consumes large amounts of natural resources,” Eckl said.
The industry can do better, much better, Eckl said.
“I'd like to suggest we all start working right now,” she said. “It's going to be a continuous process.”
Part of doing better is building more energy-efficient buildings and better using existing hospitals, said Richard Beam, director of energy management for Providence Health and Services.
Providence hospitals, of which St. Pat's is one, are already using lots of green technology - gray water, daylight lighting, onsite sewage treatment, ground-source heating, wind turbines, and photovoltaics.
Hospitals using better technology have cut their energy consumption as much as 40 percent, he said, and investment in those technologies can sometimes be funded by grants and tax credits. The payback is relatively short.
“After that, you're saving money over the life of the building,” Beam said.
In fact, Beam said a hospital working on a 6 percent profit margin saves nearly $17 on each dollar invested in energy savings.
“That money goes straight to the bottom line,” said Beam.
Couple the savings with fewer emissions from power production, and hospitals have a win-win situation.
Hospitals can also prosper by recycling and better managing their wastes, Schenk said.
American hospitals produce 6,600 tons of waste per day, and while most of it is solid waste that goes to landfills, some of it is hazardous material that requires expensive forms of disposal, including incineration.
Schenk said the health care industry is slowly moving away from incineration, but still spews far too many toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
Toxins, including pharmaceuticals and cleaning solvents, also get dumped in landfills, where they can eventually leach into soils, she said.
Hospitals are also burdened with tons of paper that can't be recycled because it contains confidential medical information.
St. Pat's has a goal to recycle 10 percent of its solid waste, better segregate its hazardous medical wastes, and rid itself entirely of mercury.
“It's a core value for us, to care about the environment,” Schenk said.
Eckl said the movement to greener hospitals has only been under way for 10 years, and the gains are promising.
“But there's a long way for us to go,” she said. “Fortunately, there are so many areas of opportunity.”
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or by
e-mail at mmoore@missoulian.com
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Genoa Dickson wrote on Oct 19, 2008 12:24 AM: