Cover
story Steps to tame hospital waste
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff
Reduce, reuse, recycle is as much a mantra as a motto
for Dominican Sr. Mary Ellen Leciejewski at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz,
Calif., where they do just that.
Leciejewski coordinates environmental programs for 35 of them in
the Catholic Healthcare West group. Each hospital has an environmental action
committee of housekeeping and engineering, doctors and nurses, human resources
and infection control personnel measuring, in Leciejewskis words,
how, in terms of solid waste, medical waste, water, electricity, energy,
etc., we can reduce the size of our ecological footprint.
Issues: the amount of medical waste per patient has more than
doubled since 1955; the Center for Disease Control reports that 2 percent or
less of a typical hospitals waste must be incinerated to protect public
health, but hospitals routinely burn 75 to 100 percent; dioxin is the major
toxic produced when hospital trash -- 18 to 33 percent of it plastic -- is
burned.
In CHW hospitals, theres a trend toward nondisposables, such
as reusable surgical drapes, said Leciejewski. All the hospitals subscribe to
the CERES principles -- a 10-point environmental code many U.S. corporations
signed on to after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska.
And theyre working with the Health Care Without Harm program
of the Campaign for Environmentally Responsible Health Care whose nine steps
include: Dont incinerate what you can recycle or reuse;
setting goals to eliminate the use of mercury-containing products by 2003; and
phasing out the use of polyvinyl chloride products.
National Catholic Reporter, July 30,
1999
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