IN DEPTH
Local action to tackle a global climate crisis
With the UN’s Global Climate Change Conference Cop 26 taking place from October, Information Professional has invited those working in the Library, Information and Knowledge services to share their efforts to create a sustainable future. In the first in the series, Adam Tocock explains how a group at St Barts Health NHS Trust is raising awareness across the organisation.
SOME days – most days now – it feels like my partner and I have brought a child into the end of the world. I‘ve been unable to enjoy the simplest pleasure of a sunny day since before my son was born because of the spectre of global warming, and latterly the rainy days that used to bring me some relief are accompanied by terrible extreme weather abroad and closer to home. Recently two of the hospitals at Barts Health NHS Trust, where I work, had to declare major incidents when they were flooded (
https://bbc.in/3ixPnEf). I joined the Trust in January 2018 as a clinical librarian based at St Barts Hospital, West Smithfield, London. The post and indeed the library was new, and part of the deal that Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) struck to secure this space was that we would commit to being a paperless office. I spent my first year establishing the service with my colleagues, and mostly ruing this deal because the majority of my users wanted to know where the printer was or where they could print from. As time went on and my regulars got used to the idea, I heard less questions about printing and I started to like the idea more myself – for the environmental aspect and especially given the many stories of malfunctions and maintenance that I heard from colleagues with printers.
Infectious passion
In truth I thought the paperless office ideal was more of a box-ticking exercise rather than any ideological effort, until I met the
20 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Adam Tocock (
adam.tocock@
nhs.net) is clinical librarian at St Barts Hospital, London.
Trust’s Waste and Environment Manager Neil Allen, by chance, at a Trust showcase event. He confirmed to me what my col- leagues had told me: that everything tossed into Barts Health’s clear waste bin bags is sorted and recycled wherever possible, no small operation. The Trust’s waste man- agement team is award winning, (https://bit. ly/3iAj2N7), and people who are passionate about their jobs are infectious. So I started to take the Trust’s greener ideals more seri- ously and stopped being apologetic on the rare occasions I was still asked about why we didn’t have a printer in the library! The following year, I went to several of Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations in
September 2021
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