Here’s How Medical Workers Are Lowering Health Care’s Carbon Footprint
March 16, 2025
Climate change threatens human health in many ways, from increasing heat illness incidences to hastening the spread of infectious diseases. This relationship also goes the other way: The health-care industry is a contributor to the causes of climate change too. In the US, the business of treating patients is responsible for 8.5 percent of the nation’s carbon emissions, over four times the footprint of the commercial aviation industry. The US health-care sector spews a quarter of the total greenhouse gas emissions coming from the global health-care sector—more than any other single country. In addition to the typical sources contributing to this output—running buildings, transportation, and delivery services on fossil fuels—some are unique to health care, and those present the best opportunities for change from within.
“Health-care organizations think we get a pass because we’re taking care of patients,” said Jodi Sherman, an anesthesiologist at Yale School of Medicine. Potent greenhouse gases flow quickly and freely from the operating room where she does her job, and she is working to fix that.
Hospitals are difficult places in which to plant seeds of change, as they are highly regulated, but Sherman is part of a growing movement of health-care practitioners reckoning with the industry’s role in climate chaos. In 2022, the White House and US Health and Human Serviceslaunched a climate pledge calling for health-care organizations to halve greenhouse emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Over 15 percent of US hospitals committed to this goal, though Sherman acknowledged not all signees may be following through. Under the current administration, HHS has since removed the web page about the pledge from its site, and did not respond to requests for comment.
At the forefront of translating a pledge into practice are individual health-care workers like Sherman who are moving to decarbonize their own workplaces in the meantime. These bottom-up changemakers are proving that environmental sustainability need not be at odds with saving lives.
When clean isn’t always green
Among health-care’s carbon emissions specifically, the majority of health care’s carbon footprint comes from the medical supply chain. The production and distribution of health care’s goods and services give off 80 percent of the sector’s carbon spew.
Such emissions have ballooned in recent decades, as the field has raced toward single-use plastics. Spurring that trend is the myth that disposable products are safest for patient health. Single-use sterile tools are critical for safety during invasive procedures, such as a needle for a blood draw, but for external-use products, such as specula, tourniquets, medical gowns, pillows, and blood pressure cuffs, experts say that proper cleaning between patients is sufficient to make them safe to reuse. This cuts down on the waste of a disposable product itself as well as the sterile packaging around it, both designed to be throwaways.
“It’s manufactured obsolescence,” Sherman said. “It’s ridiculous.”
In spite of the formidable challenges of hospital bureaucracy, some medical practitioners are introducing baby steps for reducing plastic use at their institutions. Mallory Zhang, a Kaiser Permanente gynecologic oncologist in San Bernardino, has successfully petitioned her department to switch to plant-based products in place of the plastic kind for the basins and trays that come in every operating room. Her colleague, San Francisco-based ophthalmologist Naveen Chandra, convinced 21 Northern Californian hospitals in the network to swap out plastic for biodegradable basins in operating rooms for cataract surgery.
This is an excerpt from the full article which you can read here