The health care we provide comes with a price for our planet – environmental damage, accelerating climate change, and the depletion of our natural resources. It is critical for the NHS and everyone in it to make this price as low as possible.

Two important areas are energy use and waste management. Both harm the environment, climate and resource availability, but with a mix of strategic planning, project work and involvement from everyone within the organisation, we can significantly reduce the harm they cause.

From the energy perspective, we can minimise our impact by decarbonising, and by reducing our  energy use. The whole UK electricity grid is continually decarbonising by adding more wind and solar generation every year, and this is something that we can mimic on a smaller scale within the NHS. We are reviewing the feasibility of installing rooftop solar panels and engaging with new emerging technologies such as hydrogen in order to speed up our energy decarbonisation. Switching from gas to electrically driven heating, using ground and air source heat pumps, can also help us decarbonise – the electricity supply becomes lower carbon every year, but gas heating cannot be decarbonised.

Alongside that, everyone can get involved in reducing our energy use. The large scale project to move the board from incandescent to LED lighting will save around 35 kg of CO₂ emissions per year for every bulb replaced. This is a long-term project, but we can all help right now by ensuring that lights, where not required, are switched off. This reduces our CO₂ emissions as well as our electricity bill.

Building performance is monitored and analysed through building energy systems. This allows us to spot areas where electricity and gas usage is too high, allowing us to investigate and solve the problem. This could be something as simple as ensuring windows aren’t open when the heating is simultaneously running, or turning electrical appliances off when not in use.

For domestic waste, we currently segregate our dry mixed recycling (DMR) and general waste streams. A recent visit to the waste contractor site showed that NHS Dumfries and Galloway essentially sends no waste to landfill, and any non-recycled materials are send to a ‘waste to energy’ process. This underlines the importance of ensuring our DMR bins only contain streams which can be recycled. It is the responsibility of everyone to use the correct bin. Contaminating the dry mixed recycling waste stream with other kinds of waste reduces the amount that can be recycled.

It is particularly important for everyone to keep clinical waste correctly segregated from non-clinical waste – and that only clinical waste goes into the clinical waste stream. The costs and environmental consequences of clinical waste disposal are far higher, so we need to ensure that we only send waste that actually needs to be disposed of in this way.

By ensuring correct waste stream segregation and following a ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ process we can lower our greenhouse gas emissions and reduce our use of natural resources.

Further information on the Board’s progress can be found in our annual Climate Emergency and Sustainability Report at https://www.nhsdg.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/NHS-DG-Annual-Climate-Emergency-and-Sustainablity-Report-2022-23-approved-by-Board-091023.pdf

I look forward to continuing to work with staff members across D&G to help reach our net zero goals.

Dean McLean, Energy and Sustainability Manager for NHS Dumfries and Galloway.