LGT2040: Caring for people, place and planet
There is a lot of great work being done at our Trust and across the entire NHS on sustainability.
Over the last 10 years the NHS has become a world leader in the response to climate change and has reduced its emissions by over 30%. At our Trust we are working to reduce our own carbon footprint, be more energy efficient and cut down on waste.
We are making sustainability an integral part of our culture and day-to-day operations here at LGT.
Some of our current projects include:
Our new cardboard balers are now in place
These unassuming pieces of equipment will play a vital role on our recycling waste stream. We currently create around 360 tonnes of cardboard waste a year as a Trust and these machines will compress it down into much smaller, more manageable bundles.
These are not only much easier to store, but when the cardboard is then transferred to a recycling centres it takes far fewer collections – meaning a lot less vehicles travelling to/from our sites and a reduction of our carbon footprint by 10 tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) a year! Our previous, daily, collections of cardboard used to generate 15.71 tonnes of CO2e a year and with these monthly collections we will only generate 5.26 tonnes.
Maria Chavarria, Sustainability and Waste Manager, ISS, says: "As you can imagine reducing the number of large vehicles collecting carboard from daily visits, to one a month, will have a huge impact on our carbon footprint. We’re very excited about the financial savings and the sustainability aspects of this project.”
Replacing existing bulbs with energy saving LED
Starting at the end of August around 2,000 existing lights will be replaced with smart controlled LED lights (with a total of 3,000 being replaced in total).
LED is a highly energy-efficient lighting technology and uses 50% less energy on average compared to a standard fluorescent bulb. It also means lights will switch off automatically when no-one is present and dim when more natural lighting is available, saving energy and reducing our carbon footprint.
Over the course of a year these bulbs are estimated to save us over £115,000 – and over the 12 year lifespan of the bulbs almost £1.5 million - with carbon savings of 107 tonnes per year / 1,284 tonnes over the projects lifetime.
Looking at our print output and any habits we can change
As a Trust we currently print 19,500,000+ monochrome and 3,300,000+ colour pages a year, across 638 printers each year.
As part of a programme of work with Apogee, our managed print service provider, we’re visiting departments and services around our Trust to discuss printing, potential alternatives, ways of saving money and becoming a more environmentally friendly organisation at the same time.
We want our colleagues to ask themselves the following questions before they hit the print button:
- Do I need to print this document or is there an alternative?
- Do I need really need to print this document in colour?
- Do we really need a printer in our area or is there another printer nearby that we can use?
Andy Wilson, Senior Contract Manager overseeing this workstream, says: “We know printing is often necessary and many people can’t avoid it but as a Trust we really want to make savings in this area. We’re looking forward to meeting colleagues around the Trust in the coming weeks and exploring our relationship with printing, better ways of working and the alternatives on offer.”
Discover how we are building a Greener NHS and more about our own Trust Green Plan - we’ll bring you more news on our own Green journey soon.