Waste is a common challenge for health care organizations, no matter their size. Waste is complex and expensive to manage. Hospitals produce more than 5 million tons of waste each year.
Hospitals generate over 29 pounds of waste per bed per day. A waste plan is critical for any sustainability programming.
Every hospital is challenged by the complexity of health care waste and limited recycling and management options. Recycling isn’t enough. Member hospitals who look upstream by studying incoming material and then reduce both inputs and outputs together see greater reductions in total waste costs.
Practice Greenhealth has developed many tools and resources that inspire and guide our member health care organizations to set baselines, identify goals, and implement strategies like more efficient sorting, waste prevention, robust recycling, single-use device reprocessing, composting, and other approaches to reduce the costs and environmental impacts of health care-generated waste.
Understand the waste streams, how to measure them, and how to reduce waste with our Less Waste how-to guide.
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