The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland is another facility that takes proper waste segregation seriously. In February 2012, they started a campaign to reduce trash and medical waste and reported a 200,000 pound decrease in the amount of waste produced each month, which was a 17 percent drop in the five months since it began.

They are continuing to educate their staff and make sure the operating rooms are equipped with the right waste receptacles. There are clear waste bags for general trash, red bags for biohazardous waste and recyclable bags for paper, cardboard, food containers, metals and glass.


Yale-New Haven and Johns Hopkins both also put a big emphasis on reprocessing their medical devices. For instance, Johns Hopkins sends products such as laparoscopic instruments to Stryker Sustainability Solutions and the company reprocesses them and sells them back to the hospital for about half the price.

"They're the ones that are taking these items into a container in every OR, specifically those laparoscopic trocars, tourniquets, and harmonic scalpels, they're the ones who are reprocessing it and then selling it back to us and we support that as an institution," says Erin Pilson, perioperative nurse educator at Johns Hopkins.

Yale-New Haven has a similar program, but it wasn't an immediate hit. "Initially, there was significant push-back because many physician leaders did not trust used products," says Yale-New Haven's DeVito.

But some physician leaders at Yale-New Haven are passionate about the initiative and they vouched for the integrity of it, which helped the program grow.

"Establishing physician leaders and showcasing their use of reprocessed products was essential to further the reprocessing program," says DeVito.

Let's talk about savings
Implementing sustainable initiatives in an operating room improves the environment as a whole, but it also saves hospitals a large chunk of money.

In Practice Greenhealth's fifth annual Sustainability Benchmark Report, data collected in 2012 showed member hospitals had annual savings of over 30 million dollars from about 500 energy projects that were implemented over the course of five years.

The hospitals also saved 25.5 million dollars by recycling and 3.1 million dollars by reprocessing. More specifically, Yale-New Haven saved over a million dollars from reprocessing medical devices in 2013, making it their most profitable initiative.

For Johns Hopkins, one of the biggest cost savings came through medical waste management. According to Practice Greenhealth, disposal costs for red bag waste costs 20 to 50 cents per pound, but clear bags cost three to eight cents per pound and recyclables bags cost one cent per pound. Most of the materials the hospital uses are paper products, so by putting them in the right bags they were able to save a significant amount, says Judith Haynos, assistant administrator of operations in the anesthesiology and critical care medicine department at Johns Hopkins.

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