LE CARE HOME?
health and wellbeing outcomes. With energy and food costs likely to rise significantly, with increasing competition for natural resources, in both cost and carbon management terms there is clearly a need to prioritise these areas. While reduction of pharmacy waste on its own has a lesser potential to achieve carbon savings than a focus on food or energy, improving the care home environment in terms of energy efficiency, access to green space or stimulation and community connections, should also support better general health and wellbeing. This should lead to reduced prescription and could potentially help with increased adherence to prescribed medication, with consequent co-benefits in reduced drugs waste and the embodied carbon emissions and natural resource consumption. Antipsychotics were chosen for focus in this report, however during the process of analysis and communications with homes it became clear that high volume lower value drugs represent more of an environmental and financial impact in the waste stream. Laxatives, Paracetamol, Aspirin and calcium supplements represent the most significant areas of waste, cost and carbon emissions. These 4 alone represent around 40% of all care home pharmaceutical wastes by incidence, 27.5% by both value and carbon emissions.
Commercial and offensive waste arising from homes were also investigated. Both commercial and offensive waste streams show significant opportunities for carbon and cost savings. Offensive waste is mainly hygiene and continence waste. Arisings from all care homes in the UK has been estimated from the homes studied, literature review and conversations with waste providers. Offensive wastes from UK care homes have an estimated cost of £29.3million per year and give rise to more than 30,724 tonnes of CO2
to landfill.
According to DEFRA figures (DEFRA, 2011), The UK generated 217,000 tonnes of non-hazardous healthcare and biological waste in 2008, this included the offensive wastes arising from care homes. By our calculations a staggering 50% of that waste was generated by care homes.
Care home municipal waste disposal is likely to cost around £19.5million across the UK and result in around 427,000 tonnes of CO2
emissions from disposal to recycling and landfill.
POTENTIAL SAVINGS Energy From the four case study homes studied, potential energy use savings were identified that could cut consumption and bills by an average of 11%
If equivalent savings were realised
nationally, this could save £52.8million in energy costs and 220,000 tonnes of CO2
e
each year. To put these figures in perspective 220,000 tonnes pa is the same as the entire annual 2003 carbon footprint of the Sechelles (
www.nationmaster.com). A conservative estimate of 2.5% energy savings has been attributed to the active use of smart metering in homes to manage and reduce energy consumption. The carbon trust states that 5% reductions can be typically achieved through the use of smart metering.
e assuming disposal
Three of the four homes had smart meters, however none of the care home staff were given access to the half hourly data, or trained how to spot trends and energy waste. As home managers are onsite they are more likely to be aware of the local causes of small fluctuations in energy use and would be better placed to reduce waste if provided with the data and training.
A national programme of better metering and training alone could
PUBLIC SECTOR SUSTAINABILITY • VOLUME 2 ISSUE 6 17
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