The green efforts of Madigan Army Medical Center earned it the honor of being awarded the Practice Greenhealth Environmental Excellence Award in May.
This award is given to healthcare organizations which find innovative ways to improve their environmental programs; Practice Greenhealth is an organization that encourages and recognizes environmentally responsible practices in hospitals.
"As the co-chair for the Green Team, I would say Madigan's success in greening the hospital is mainly (attributable to) the positive impact demonstrated daily by staff at all levels of the organization," said Michael Kyser, the supervisor of Madigan's Environmental Health Service.
"It's a direct result of adjusting to new initiatives and innovations supporting the quality of environment of care with regards to the materials we use and the processes we've so gracefully accepted as the right thing to do in the best interest of fiscal integrity, patients, visitors, staff and the environment," he added.
Madigan's Green Team boasts a trail of other environmental awards in the past few years, to include Practice Greenhealth's Top 25 Environmental Excellence Award in 2014, their Environmental Leadership Circle in 2013, their Partner for Change with Distinction award in 2010, and their Making Medicine Mercury-Free award in 2007.
In the past year, Madigan's green efforts resulted not only in significant environmental results but also other recognition, to include earning an Energy Star award from the Environmental Protection Agency for obtaining an energy efficiency rating of 91 percent, largely due to investing in green technology such as LED lighting, green tips on energy-saving bulbs, and energy-efficient facility equipment.
Madigan also won first place in a Joint Base Lewis-McChord Net Zero competition in support of sustainability goals for energy, water and waste. Not only did Madigan increase their diversion rate from 45 to 48 percent from 2013 to 2014 (diverting material from the trash that can be recycled, reused, recovered or repurposed), but the hospital took the goal of reducing trash to a new height by making Madigan's last unit organizational day a waste-free event. Through efforts such as handing out compostable utensils (made of sugar and corn starch), Madigan's Green Team managed to divert 98 percent of the byproducts of the event to be recycled or composted.
In general, Madigan strives to reduce its environmental impact through efforts such as sending cooking grease to be used for biofuel, returning expired medications to pharmaceutical distributors for credit, and ensuring that regulated medical waste, one of the largest sources of waste at the hospital, is significantly reduced. Madigan shrunk its regulated medical waste by four tons from 2013 by focusing on properly separating out trash from medical waste.
"It's the efforts of the OR that's really making it happen," said Kyser.
With a long history of environmental improvements (such as increasing its recycling rate from 10 percent in 2005 to 48 percent in 2014), Madigan's Green Team plans to keep this trend going throughout 2015. Current projects include installing water bottle filters throughout Madigan to encourage the use of reusable water bottles, and an effort to repurpose old furniture which cannot be reused by recycling any scrap metal, wood and cloth used.
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