Environmental footprinting of hospitals: Organizational life cycle assessment of a Canadian hospital

• Published in: Journal of industrial ecology Vol. 27; no. 5; pp. 1335 - 1353
• Main Authors: Cimprich, Alexander, Young, Steven B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Haven Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.10.2023
• Subjects: Anesthesia; Carbon dioxide; Carbon footprint; Climate change; Footprint analysis; Footprinting; Generalizability; Global warming; Greenhouse effect; Greenhouse gases; Health care; Hospitals; Life cycle analysis; Life cycle assessment; Life cycles; Medical equipment; Medical materials; Prescription drugs; Service industries; Wastewater; Water use; Canada
• ISSN: 1088-1980; 1530-9290
• DOI: 10.1111/jiec.13425

Abstract Healthcare is a critical and complex service sector with direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions amounting to 5%–10% of the national total in developed economies like Canada and the United States. Along with a growing, albeit sporadic, set of life cycle assessment (LCA) (and “carbon footprinting”) studies of specific medical products and procedures, there is growing interest in “environmental footprinting” of hospitals. In this article, we advance this rapidly evolving area through a comprehensive organizational LCA of a 40‐bed hospital in British Columbia, Canada, in its 2019 fiscal year. Our results indicate that the total environmental footprint of the hospital includes, among other things, global warming potential of 3500–5000 t CO 2 eq. (with 95% confidence). “Hotspots” in this footprint are attributable to energy and water use (and wastewater released), releases of anesthetic gases (which are potent GHGs), and the upstream production of the thousands of materials, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other products used in the hospital. The generalizability and comparability of these results are limited by inconsistencies across the few environmental footprinting studies of hospitals conducted to date. Nonetheless, our novel methodological approach, in which we compiled new LCA data for 200 goods and services used in healthcare—strategically selected to statistically represent the 2927 unique products in the hospital's “supply‐chains”—has broad applicability in healthcare and beyond.