Green Team Helps CC Support Environmental Sustainability
Episode # 25
Uploaded: 8/24/2009
Running Time: 3:53
MARTINO: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. The Clinical Center has recently joined the ranks of hospitals across the country working towards a healthier environment with the creation of the Clinical Center Green Team. Under the leadership of nutrition department head Dave Folio, the CC green team was developed to look at how the CC conducts its day to day activities and determine how to conduct those activities in a "greener way". According to Folio, it is especially important for the Clinical Center to address these issues because of the amount of resources the Clinical Center uses every day.
FOLIO: Hospitals in general use tremendous amounts of resources, tremendous amounts of energy and there are simple things that we can do to just change the way we think. At home, when you leave the room, you shut the lights off and we just want to instill that same idea with what you do here at work and think of this as kind of an extension of your home, you recycling at home, you shut the lights off at home, we want you to realize that and do that here and we will really be able to make a difference because NIH uses a tremendous amount of electricity and energy.
MARTINO: At a recent meeting of the green team, Folio reported that according to the Office of Resource Facilities the NIH Bethesda Campus uses about $65.5 million dollars of electricity per year, and approximately 10% of that is used by the Clinical Center. In response to this figure and others like it, the Clinical Center green team has three main goals.
FOLIO: One is to increase recycling in the clinical center, one of the other goals is to decrease the amount of copy paper and printer paper in the clinical center, so increasing in recycling and decreasing in paper consumption and the third thing is to decrease the amount of electricity used by the clinical center.
MARTINO: Whether you are a clinical center employee or visitor, there are ways you can help. If you leave a room for more than a few minutes, turn off the lights. Make sure that you recycle ink and toner cartridges in the bins found throughout the clinical center because with each cartridge donated, $1 goes to NIH charities like Friends of the Clinical Center. Employees can try to make smarter use of their printers to save toner and make sure that materials are copied and printed double sided if possible. Another initiative of the CC green team is the Desk Side Recycling program:
FOLIO: One of the things that we decided to do that was offered up by NIH was the desk side recycling. So we have two blue bins that are provided to staff, they look like trash receptacles but they are blue, one is for commingled, which is cans and bottles, and one is for mixed paper and they sit right at the desk side so that you don't have to get up until the bins are full to really empty them or you can empty them whenever you want. So this is to encourage recycling, we can actually measure the amount of recyclables that the clinical center produces we can actually measure that by weight so we will be able to look at that over time, and see if our efforts have come to fruition.
MARTINO: For more information about greening initiatives at the Clinical Center or about NIH's commitment to the environment, visit the NIH Environmental Management Systems website http://www.nems.nih.gov/ and for more information about the NIH Clinical Center, including news about the medical research going on here every day, log on to http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov. From America's Clinical Research Hospital, this has been CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. In Bethesda, Maryland, I'm Nicole Martino at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
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