ADVER TISEMENT FEA TURE
Tosoh and the environment Helping the NHS to reach net zero
Tosoh explains how the company has been looking at ways to help reduce its environmental impact – both within its own business and on behalf of its customers, especially the NHS
The environment is in the news every day one way or another, and is a key focus area for everyone whether from a personal or business perspective. It is the responsibility of both large corporations like Tosoh as well as on an individual level; for example buying/providing eco-friendly products or recycling at home.
Tosoh takes this responsibility very seriously and has therefore taken a number of additional measures recently to help reduce its environmental impact. One of the most recent steps was to remove our office. All our staff are home or field based and with the pandemic, it was soon realised the office was not required for day-to-day working. It was therefore decided to not renew the lease on the building, and move to a virtual office environment allowing employees to work from home when and where possible on a permanent basis. Even though the office was rarely used, it still used utilities such as heating, air conditioning, electrical consumption and lighting, regardless of occupancy levels. Therefore without the office, Tosoh’s carbon footprint were significantly reduced.
Supply chain
A further initiative was to look at the company’s supply chain. Tosoh’s next focus point was to look at minimising cool shipment deliveries, which are air freighted to the UK and then couriered by road to the customer. All UK customers were contacted to determine if a reduced number of cool shipments was possible. The storage space for these products is minimal and offered the additional benefit of reduced lot changes for calibrators and QC material to the end users.
This project required minimal effort, the number of shipments delivered by courier has been reduced by 31% in the first year and the process is still ongoing to try to increase the percentage conversion rate.
Shipments of spare parts to our field service engineers was also streamlined by dispatching ‘only when required’ rather than ‘once used’, resulting in a 66% reduction in deliveries in the first 12 months alone. In addition, the disposal of redundant and deinstalled end of life analysers within the UK under WEEE guidance rather than shipping back to our Belgian Headquarters for disposal all contribute to a reduced carbon footprint within Tosoh.
Net-zero NHS
All four UK health services have united in a pledge to become carbon net zero. Their aim is to become the world’s first net- zero national health service1
.
The NHS has given itself a challenging goal to become net zero by 2040, with the aim of reaching 80% of that target by 2028-2032.1
It’s clear that companies providing products into the healthcare system must
undertake a responsibility to assist and help the NHS achieve their carbon net zero goal.
With this in mind, Tosoh investigated innovative solutions with two goals in mind:
1. To proactively reduce the carbon footprint of our end users, which are predominantly to NHS laboratories
2. Take ownership away from NHS pathology laboratories and back to Tosoh for the disposal of our used consumable products.
Tosoh looked at the products dispatched to customers that are not currently recycled and are directly disposed of by the laboratories, these included aluminium laminate pouches. Internal data shows Tosoh ships in excess of 51,000 pouches per year in the UK alone. These are typically sent for either incineration or landfill via the NHS waste disposal management routes.
Incineration (energy recovery) and landfill processes used by the NHS both carry a significant carbon footprint, producing toxic gases with no recovery of the plastic or aluminium from the Tosoh buffer pouches and as such can be considered as suboptimal processes. (See figure 1).
FIGURE 1
CARBON FOOTPRINT BY DISPOSAL METHOD (KG CO2
e)
Based on 1,000 laminate pouches1
Landfill
Energy recovery
Tosoh
recycling process
Comparison of common disposal methods image courtesy of Enval Ltd
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