Responsibility Starts at Home
Green vibe spreads through Vermont health system
By Mark Leiser
Environmental responsibility has been an integral part of the mission at Fletcher Allen Health Care for more than two decades. Lately, however, Fletcher Allen, which operates a 562-bed acute-care hospital in Burlington, Vt., as well as more than 30 patient care sites throughout the region, has been a model for others in the industry.
Earlier this year, Practice Greenhealth, a networking organization that helps healthcare institutions commit to sustainable, eco-friendly practices, inducted Fletcher Allen into its Environmental Leadership Circle. The honor is reserved for entities that demonstrate outstanding commitment to reducing their operations’ environmental footprint.
As with most prior inductees, Fletcher Allen didn’t set out for recognition. “It wasn’t so much us trying to be at the forefront,” says Louis Dinneen, Fletcher Allen’s director of facilities management. “We’ve always had a strong culture of environmental awareness. The feeling really was more along the lines of, ‘What else can we do?’ ”
The answer? Plenty. And many of its actions have yielded significant cost savings. In the past year, Fletcher Allen:
- Replaced an aging air handler with a more efficient water-chilled model. The new unit cost about $57,000, but it is expected to conserve 4.6 million gallons of water each year. That will translate to $36,000 in annual savings, helping recoup the initial investment within two years.
- Signed a three-year contract with two vendors to recycle operating-room instruments, a move expected to save more than $380,000.
- Composted more than 286 tons of waste and set a goal to recycle an additional 40 tons this year, which would save several thousand dollars in landfill hauling and tipping fees.
- Reduced its energy consumption on its main campus by 8% by tackling projects both large, such as replacing the air handler, and small, such as adding insulation on steam valves and shifting to more efficient lighting.
In 2009, Fletcher Allen set out to reduce consumption by another 1 million kilowatt hours. It easily surpassed the target, reducing consumption by about 2.5 million kilowatt hours as of late July and saving an estimated $250,000 in utility costs in the first seven months of the year.
The efforts also carry over into nutrition services. In 2006, Fletcher Allen signed the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge, which contends that the methods used to produce and distribute foods often are not aligned with dietary guidelines and rely too heavily on practices that adversely affect public health and the environment. Signing the pledge “solidified” efforts to buy goods from local farms to cut down on transportation and reduce pollution, says Diane Imrie, director of nutrition services. Managers and supervisors also identified ways to reduce waste, so everything a person “eats on, in, or with is either recyclable or compostable,” Imrie says.
The hospital stopped using foam and plastic cups and plates, instead choosing products made from 100% reclaimed fibers that fully degrade into water, carbon dioxide, and organic material when composted. They replaced disposable catering trays with reusable trays, a move that saves about $1,000 a year.
And in May, the medical center unveiled its new Harvest Café. The facility is designed to be “the most sustainable cafe in healthcare” across the country, Imrie says. “That was a pretty lofty goal,” she adds. “We have a lot of work to do, but we have come a long way.”
The menu at the cafe—referred to by some in-house as “the starship”—incorporates such locally grown organic fare as soy milk and squash. It serves turkey and chicken raised without nontherapeutic antibiotics or arsenical compounds, and it also offers fair-trade coffee, which is produced without pesticides.
Fletcher Allen occasionally uses consultants to help identify ways to maximize efficiency and reduce the system’s environmental footprint, but most initiatives start internally and develop through the efforts of employees in each department, Dinneen says.
“Initially, you go for the low-hanging fruit,” he explains. “The further you go along, you find each initiative you take on is a little bit harder to do.”
That doesn’t mean Fletcher Allen is slowing down.
“Because we’ve implemented so much already, we tend not to look at what the obstacles are,” Dinneen says. “We just say, ‘What are we going to do?’ We’ve learned to barge through and find a way to do it.”