Pollution Prevention/Sustainable Practices
What Sustainability Brings to Healthcare Industrial Hygiene
Sustainability is framework for making measurably better choices in the face of risk and change by anticipating and responding to coming challenges. The approach is to apply systems thinking in planning to address the triple bottom line - that is, the financial, social and environmental benefits and impacts of a proposed project or change.
Sustainability initiatives will involve life cycle analyses to include resource consumption, design, production, operations, marketing, accounting, and waste. Thus, each alternative must be assessed in terms of the environment, human health, and economic benefit to both individuals and society. Because of the broad benefits possible through sustainability, applying it can bring in new energy and new allies to address industrial hygiene concerns.
A case history illustrates this:
A Midwestern hospital used 1,110 gallons of Ethylene Glycol to winterize heating cools each year, as the water used in summer months will freeze. It is nearly impossible to drain 100 percent of the water in the cooling coils of air handling units because of the serpentine nature of coils.
In order to prevent the water in the coils from freezing, the hospital has a winterization strategy which involves adding a antifreeze solution into the coils each fall, and then draining this solution to the sewer in the spring. A sustainable approach to the problem yielded the a solution of blowing out the coils after draining to remove residual water, eliminating the need for the ethylene glycol, which reduced exposure potential to workers, kept the chemical out of the environment and reduce annula costs by an estimated $4550.
Goals
1. Share healthcare P2/ Sustainability information within the AIHA and the broader EH&S and healthcare sectors, such as:
- Create referenced position statement and post it, with other resources for select issues, on the AIHA HCWG website; including links to H2e and other like-minded resources.
- Present at AIHCE on P2 projects occurring in health care facilities that demonstrate P2/sustainability approaches and are generalizable to other industries (e.g. projects in housekeeping, facilities, green building, food service).
- Present a consistent P2/ Sustainability voice in our interactions with other healthcare entities and provide supporting evidence of occupational safety and operational efficiency benefits of P2 initiatives to our health care colleagues.
2. Share P2/ sustainability within the broader AIHA healthcare group-
- Actively promote P2 by raising awareness of selective issues through our interactions with the general health care group.
- Develop joint presentations for AIHCE and /or brief reports via phone meetings focused on P2 as a way to address EH&S concerns in the health care setting.
3. Share informal resources amongst participants in the AIHA HCWG P2/sustainability group
- Network our skills, resources, experience & purchasing power to help each other address HC P2/sustainability concerns at our healthcare systems
- Research emerging issues such as thimerasol in new vaccines, effective purchasing policies, appropriate waste characterization and regulation, original research of P2 interest, articles and so forth.
4. Provide where feasible technical assistance to assist the health care P2 community to understand and address emerging issues, and issues of toxicity and exposure related to specific chemicals or processes in health care settings.
Project Team Lead: Siobhan K. Dugan, PhD
Lara S. Bucklew, REM
Stephen J. Derman
Thomas P. Fuller, ScD, CIH, MSPH, MBA
John F. Koerner, CIH
Sarah O'Brien
Erica J. Stewart, CIH
Matthew M. Winn
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