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When I first heard my employer launched a Green Team, I thought it was fantastic! We went “green” just in time for Earth Day in 2008. To me, it just makes sense to live consuming less than we need, not more. So I was very proud of them.
Besides that, our 126-year-old mission statement says that Lutheran HealthCare defines health as the “total” well-being of the community including decent housing, language and educational classes to help find a job, civic participation and more. Given what we know today about greenhouse gasses and global warming, we expanded that mission to commit ourselves to another component of health — our environment.
Now, we have a Green Team that meets each month and hammers out how to operate in a more environmentally sound manner by examining energy conservation measures and product purchases. They started with the usual: placing recycling receptacles at strategic points, encouraging people to place bottles in the bottle bin, trash in the trash bin, paper in the paper bin, and so on. They set up a bicycle rack for those that wanted to skip commuting by car, worked with copier vendors and developed a toner recycling solution, worked with area coffee shops to give workers a discount if they came in with their own cup, and much more.
Recently, the Green Team was instrumental in launching a new weekly farmers market at the hospital. Along with the benefits of locally grown produce, obviously fresh food has many other health benefits. A lighting “retrofit” project is not only reducing our carbon footprint by 1.8 million pounds a year, it’s also saving about $180,000 in energy costs annually. And they happily joined Michael Bloomberg's "PlaNYC Mayor's Challenge" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
I worked closely with the team on a small project of my own that ended up saving me 60,000 sheets of paper and $360 a year. Not a huge impact by itself but certainly a start. On the other hand, what if only one person like me at each of the country’s 5,800 hospitals saved 60,000 sheets of paper? That’s 348 million sheets or $2 million, every year!
Our CEO is committed to this — even as hospital margins become increasingly tighter and the national health care debate rages on at full speed. It takes strong leadership to put teams and projects like this in place, and in particular, leadership that can think out of the box. The Green Team, like all of us, continues to learn how to make more educated choices, conserve energy in different ways, and overall reduce our environmental impact. I look forward to helping them.
