Healing Hospitals: Advancing Sustainability in Healthcare

Kyle Tafuri ’13 opens the Ramapo College Expert Practitioners in Sustainability series with a lecture on sustainability and hospitals

As Senior Sustainability Advisor to Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC), Kyle Tafuri, alumnus of the RCNJ Master of Art in Sustainability Studies program, has made a tremendous impact in only three and a half years on the job. He offered a view into his world Wednesday evening at the first talk of the 2016 lecture series “Lessons of Sustainability: Voices of Key Practitioners” to an attentive audience in Friends Hall .

Hospitals are huge energy consumers and produce a lot of waste. There are over 20 different waste streams at the hospital that need to be dealt with, and, through education and habit change, they have been able to reduce the amount of non-hazardous waste ending up in the hazardous waste bags, helping to save the hospital money and reduce the amount of waste by half.

The key to Tafuri’s success at HUMC has been aligning sustainability initiatives with the overriding mission of the hospital as a bastion of public health in the community. “This is how I got a room full of highly-educated doctors and executives to let me tell them what to do,” he explained. “I showed that my sustainability mission is in line with their healthcare mission.”

His presentation included numerous facts and examples. He explained to the audience the many waste streams that are generated by the state’s largest hospital, and how some of them are disposed of. He then illustrated how the different waste streams have different costs – both financially and environmentally, and how he was able to save the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars by changing staff habits (and removing some receptacles) to reduce the amount of non-contaminated waste put into “red bags” that have a much greater cost than regular waste or recycling. With funding always an issue in healthcare, administrators were very pleased to apply those savings to patient care.

Statistically, nurses have the highest rate of occupation-related asthma due to the many chemicals and materials they are exposed to daily. “Do you want to go to a hospital to get treated for pneumonia and be exposed to chemicals that make it hard to breathe?” Kyle asked. Seeing the hospital as a place that should set an example of health in its own environment helped gain support for initiatives as diverse as moving to Eco-Logo certified cleaning chemicals, working to remove harmful types of plastics present in everything from IV lines to incubators, banning carcinogenic flame retardants from furniture and mattresses, and working toward getting antibiotic-free meat for patient meals. He also gave examples of initiatives tied to HUMC’s mission to promote public health within the community.

Tafuri has worked to find products that cause less harm to the people working and visiting the hospital.   He has worked with suppliers to try and find out what is in products, in order to get ones that will not cause any harm. An example of this is products that use flame retardant chemicals. Flame retardants contain carcinogens and that is something that should not be used in hospitals. Tafuri called up their furniture suppliers and told them that if they could not provide the hospital with flame retardant free furniture, they would find another company that would. Now the hospital has furniture that does not contain flame retardants. The hospital has also worked on the food they serve. They no longer serve soda and have antibiotic-free chicken. Many of the hospitals that are a part of Hackensack University Medical Center also have green spaces for people to have lunch breaks or sit and relax. For instance, many of the accessible rooftops have been turned into gardens, which help patients and staff relax and provide therapeutic benefits.

In a separate seminar afterward with MASS students, Kyle answered questions and went into more depth about how he achieved his goals. His first advice was to learn the politics (who gets things done? How? What is the selling point for the person you’re talking to?) and to build alliances: “Find the passionate people.”   He provided an example of using purchasing power to force vendors to make changes. Other methods he discussed included using sustainability goals as part of employee performance incentives, changing to match existing priorities and latching on to them, and doing what you can rather than waiting for the perfect solutions. Winning national “green” hospital awards two years running and being asked to address members of congress doesn’t hurt, either.

This was the first in what promises to be a wonderful series of talks, titled Creating a Sustainable World: Voices of Key Practitioners.

Written by Heather McAdam & Taylor Donohue

Categories: Sustainability