Hospital staff members are accustomed to training. There are always new procedures, technology and systems to learn in health care. But learning how to throw out trash is a new wrinkle in hospital education.
Trash training, however, has been underway at Emory University Hospital Midtown (EUHM), with Emory University Hospital (EUH) not far behind. These two operating rooms are going ‘green,’ as part of a comprehensive waste management plan. Emory Healthcare and Emory University have a combined goal of diverting landfill waste by 65 percent across all Emory by 2015 through recycling and compositing.
Hospitals began moving away from laundered cloth table coverings and gowns in the 80’s largely due to the laundering expense and the fear of AIDS, said Kent Haythorn, RN, MS, director of perioperative services, EUHM. “But paper table covers are bulky and can almost fill up a regular bag of trash. Jane Duggan, one of our anesthesiologists had concerns about the amount of trash we create and suggested we find ways to address it.”
“Operating rooms create a tremendous volume of waste,” said Jane Duggan, MD, assistant professor of anesthesiology and lead of the OR Green Team at EUHM. “Much of it is clean waste and can be recycled. Health care sustainability is critical, and by diverting waste from landfills, we expect to take huge strides in greening our campus.”
Practice Greenhealth, a hospital sustainability organization, estimates that hospitals produce almost six billion tons of waste annually, or 33 pounds per bed per day. Operating rooms are among the biggest generators of trash.
With a go-ahead from facilities management, Duggan put together a team of staff members and engaged several vendors to help address the trash issue. “We particularly looked at what needs to go in our red bins (hazardous waste) because that trash requires special transportation and goes through a process of sterilization and incineration. It costs three to four times as much to dispose of red bin items,” said Haythorn. “Blood soaked coverings obviously needed to go in there, but other things we discovered could be dispensed with differently.”
Working with Stericycle, a medical and hazardous waste company, the two Emory ORs are now collecting clean plastic containers, clean plastic wrap and clean cardboard boxes, many of which are used to package surgical and sterile medical equipment, for recycling. The company also collects recyclable plastic, aluminum, glass and paper from common spaces such as waiting rooms, lobbies and offices.
“We also have a bin for opened packages of medical instruments. Those that aren’t used, we donate to MedShare [a non-profit organization] that sends them to underserved clinics and hospitals around the world,” said Haythorn.
Working with Stryker, a medical technology company, operating room staff now place used medical equipment, such as laparoscopic devices, arthroscopic/orthopedic devices and energy devices in a bin that goes to Florida for recycling. Haythorn said that the hospital was still studying whether to purchase pre-processed devices, but by collecting them, they knew they were reducing landfill waste.
“Tearing down an operating room is a step-by-step process. By having more recycling bins, we have added a couple of steps to the process. It’s a little more complicated, but our vendors have made it simple and easy and we haven’t seen any operational deficits,” said Haythorn.
While staff members joke that if they get any more bins in the OR, there won’t be room for people, the response to the new plan has been positive and enthusiastic for the most part. “We only started the program in March. My assumption is that we aren’t spending any more or less on waste management, but we didn’t make changes for cost-savings, but for environmental reasons. We wanted to reduce what we put in landfills because we believed it was the right thing to do for all of us and the earth,” said Haythorn.
He’s especially proud that the push for this initiative came from the staff, not hospital leadership. “It was staff members on the front lines who felt this was important,” he said. “My job is to break down the barriers to higher-ups so that new ideas can go forward. When I do that, I feel like I’m doing a good job.”
Haythorn said that as hospitals seek to be more sustainable, a variety of ‘going green’ initiatives are being implemented. He’s proud that Emory Midtown is leading the way.
