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Waste
Reduction—Green Purchasing
Environmentally Preferable Purchasing for Hospitals
Overview
What is Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP)?
Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) is the act of purchasing products/services whose environmental impacts have been considered and found to be less damaging to the environment and human health when compared to competing products/services.
A successful EPP effort may start with a few carefully targeted purchasing changes, but EPP programs should also establish procedures and methods that support continually expanding the scope of environmental purchasing to select as many environmentally sound, healthy and safe products and services as a facility can use.
In this section
What are the benefits of EPP?
EPP is “preventive medicine” that promotes the heath of the environment -- reducing negative environmental or health effects related to products before they occur. Downstream corrections of environmental or occupational health issues are almost always more costly – in terms of dollars, labor, technical complexity, and adverse publicity -- than prevention. By carefully selecting goods and services, hospitals can:
- significantly reduce their overall impact on the environment
- reduce costs with lower purchase prices or changes that eliminate some waste disposal or reduce the need for worker safety measures and hazardous waste disposal
- provide a healthier environment for patients, workers and employees through reduced exposure to hazardous substances in such products as cleaners, solvents and paints
- create opportunities for positive publicity and promotion
In addition, EPP is a tool that can be used not only to generally improve facilities’ environmental performance, but to address existing issues with wastes, worker safety or patient comfort. For example, if you have had staff injuries from cleaning chemicals, adopting greener cleaning supplies may help reduce injury rates; if your hazardous waste costs are higher than you want, you may be able to reduce waste significantly by purchasing alternative chemicals or installing solvent recovery systems; you may be able to address staff and patient indoor air quality complaints through changing building materials such as carpet, furniture or wallcoverings.
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Why is the purchasing stage so important?
Nearly every waste that leaves a hospital came in through purchasing. Purchasing departments (or Group Purchasing Organizations) are the central standard-setting point for nearly every product or service used in the hospital.
During the procurement process, vendors compete to meet an institution’s specifications in order to win a contract, so it is a very effective point to request or require that vendors reduce the environmental impact of their products and services.
Environmental specifications can address numerous aspects of a product or service.
- Product specifications can address chemical content, recycled content, less-toxic materials, user training, packaging, shipping, and end of life collection and recycling services.
- Service specifications can require notification, worker training, data collection, audit trails, and other accountability measures to ensure high performance.
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EPP Obstacles in Hospitals
Product Availability/Performance Environmentally sound products may not be readily available, or their properties may be different from products currently in use.
- Communicate your desire for environmentally preferable alternatives to vendors and GPOs! Increased demand for environmentally preferable products will help lower prices and improve quality, as companies ramp up to large scale production
Accounting practices hide EPP’s financial benefits Because purchasing is usually focused on up-front product costs, disposal, insurance, training and other costs are not factored in when determining acceptable purchase prices. This makes justification of increased up-front purchasing costs difficult.
- Integrate "total cost assessment" procedures into contracts as much as you can. This means adjusting financial evaluation procedures to consider costs and financial savings over the entire life of a product or service, and may require some negotiating with your accounting department.
Purchasing is limited to GPO contracts Hospital purchasing is sometimes limited to a list of products contracted through a given Group Purchasing Organization (GPO).
- It is essential to express the desire for environmentally preferable products to your GPO. If possible, create a written agreement with the GPO that commits them to working to provide your hospital with greener products through custom contracting, or through inclusion of ‘green’ products on their standard contracts. Include a clause that allows you to buy off contract where an environmentally preferable product is not available through their contracts. More
Users may be resistant to change Even where there is agreement that the change is desirable, users may be reluctant to adopt new practices or products because they are unfamiliar with or distrustful of them.
- Limited pilots involving end users can eliminate perceptions that environmentally preferable products do not work as well as their conventional versions. The opportunity to re-think practices and assess new alternatives not only allays ‘product performance anxiety’, it often results in innovative ideas with benefits that extend beyond the scope initially planned.
With proper planning, good communication, help from your Group Purchasing Organization, participation of affected staff and staged implementation of your initiatives, Environmentally Preferable Purchasing can become a valuable part of your overall environmental improvement efforts, and can increase the efficiency and safety of your operations in the process.
For more on how to implement an EPP program, see Getting Started with EPP.
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