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Climate change and hospitals: tool calculates emissions
With the help of a new, free tool, healthcare facilities such as hospitals can calculate their carbon footprint. It helps to record different types of emissions and thus create their own greenhouse gas balance.
16/06/2023
What greenhouse gas emissions are produced in a hospital? Where are the biggest levers for more climate protection? Where can climate-damaging emissions be reduced? To answer these questions, the Öko-Institut and the Freiburg University Medical Centre have developed a tool that can be used to calculate carbon footprints for healthcare facilities. The German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) has funded the project. The tool is free of charge and freely available. It helps hospitals and care facilities to record various types of emissions in accordance with standards in order to create their own greenhouse gas balance sheet.
Healthcare: Responsible for five per cent of emissions„The healthcare sector is responsible for around five per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in Germany“, says Dr Andreas Köhler, Group Manager Chemicals, Materials & Technologies at the Öko-Institut. With our tool, clinics and other healthcare facilities can now accurately calculate their greenhouse gas emissions and take targeted measures to reduce emissions on this basis.
Tool takes into account various types of emissions in the hospital
„With our carbon footprinting tool, healthcare facilities can easily and comprehensibly determine how high the climate impact is in the respective areas“, emphasises Köhler. „The tool, which is based on the internationally standardised ‚Greenhouse Gas Protocol‘, takes into account both direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions“.
This includes direct emissions from combustion processes in our own energy generation plants, indirect emissions from the purchase of purchased energy sources and upstream and downstream emissions from the purchase of goods and services.
The tool also includes points such as the production of active ingredients in medicines, production, packaging and transport of hygiene and cleaning products, medical consumables, medicines, food and patient mobility in the calculation.
The above texts, or parts thereof, were automatically translated from the original language text using a translation system (DeepL API).
Despite careful machine processing, translation errors cannot be ruled out.