June 18, 2011 – Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego received a Green Leadership Award from BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) at a recent World Environment Day celebration. Rady Children’s was recognized for its commitment to sustainable healthcare by implementing innovative programs to reduce its environmental impact.
The clinical and public health benefits of single-use medical devices such as needles and syringes are well known but hospitals are increasingly concerned about reducing medical waste that is sent to landfills. As a leader in addressing this issue, Rady Children’s has been seeking solutions to reduce this waste without compromising patient care or adding cost. In this collaboration with BD and Waste Management (WM), Rady Children’s expects to divert more than 70 percent of these single-use devices from local landfills.
“We are pleased to acknowledge Rady Children’s for its commitment and leadership to a more sustainable healthcare environment,” said Alberto Mas, President, BD Medical – Medical Surgical Systems. “The connection between human health and a healthy environment is inseparable. For this reason, BD is committed to supporting our customers with solutions that reduce our combined environmental impacts.”
Rady Children’s implemented the first pilot of the new BD ecoFinity™ Life Cycle Solutions program to recycle single-use medical devices such as needles and syringes. In this program, WM provides safe, convenient on-site collection of filled sharps containers, plus treatment and recovery of the contents for recycling. BD will then use the recovered plastic to make new BD collectors for a closed loop waste solution.
“This environmentally-friendly solution to disposing of sharps wastes falls perfectly in line with our hospital initiatives to reduce, reuse and recycle,” said Randy Veenstra, Green Team leader at Rady Children’s. “We estimate that, thanks to this program, 38,000 pounds of sharps waste that might have been sent to a landfill will be recycled.”
Rady Children’s was recognized by BD for demonstrating leadership in the medical community as the first to pilot a sharps waste reduction program. Two other healthcare facilities were also honored for implementing the program, DaVita Inc., Denver, CO and Montefiore Health System, Bronx, NY.
World Environment Day celebration began in 1972 and has grown to become one of the main vehicles through which the United Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and encourages political attention and action.
Media Contact: Ben Metcalf
858-966-8579(office)
bmetcalf@rchsd.org
About Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego:
Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, the largest children’s hospital in California, is a 442-bed pediatric care facility providing the largest source of comprehensive pediatric medical services in San Diego, Southern Riverside and Imperial counties. Rady Children’s is the only hospital in the San Diego area dedicated exclusively to pediatric healthcare and is the region’s only designated pediatric trauma center. On October 10, 2010, Rady Children’s opened the Acute Care Pavilion, a LEED-Certified (green) building that is home to the incredible Peckham Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders, the state-of-the-art Warren Family Surgical Center, and a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit that cares for our community’s most fragile newborns. In May 2011, U.S. News & World Report ranked Rady Children’s among the best children’s hospitals in the nation in all ten pediatric specialties the magazine surveyed. For more information, visit www.rchsd.org and find us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.