In October 2020, the NHS became the world’s first health service to commit to reaching carbon net zero.
One of our priorities is to promote, develop and embed the NHS Green agenda, specifically procurement policies, staff energy champions, travel, waste and energy reduction. As part of this, we will invest £10 million from the Public Sector Decarbonisation Fund – joint Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) – in Green schemes across all three hospitals.
Scunthorpe General Hospital will be the first NHS hospital in England to use renewable geothermal power for its heating and hot water, helping to reduce the hospital’s carbon footprint by 60%. We won an award for reducing, reusing and recycling our waste. We achieved four out of a possible five stars in the Zero Waste Awards and the team are working hard to achieve that extra star in the future. Our waste team has also supplied redundant beds to a Beverley-based charity who equip hospitals in Africa.
We have recently rolled our recycling hubs at Scunthorpe and Grimsby. These are colour-coded for mixed recycling, plastic bottles and general waste. We are also encouraging staff to reuse furniture and other items where possible, rather than disposing of it. Previously all of our clinical waste was incinerated including single-use instruments. These are now heated in an autoclave machine before entering the recycling chain as scrap metal.
We are now able to recycle lots more items of plastics than we were previously able to. This includes bed headboards and non-contaminated plastics. At COP26, 100 leaders agreed to end deforestation by 2030. We are doing our bit by replacing the trees we have previously chopped down in order to make way for our new buildings.
You can request a copy of our Green Plan or Travel Plan by emailing nlg-tr.comms@nhs.net.
