Measuring the Carbon Footprint for Health Systems and Suppliers: A Collaborative Field Study by Providence and Becton Dickinson

The carbon emissions from assets owned by health systems are a small fraction of their total carbon footprint. The emissions produced by their suppliers of products and services - such as electricity and transportation - are typically more than 10 times a hospital's direct emissions. In this study, two entities, a large health system and its major supplier of syringes, applied the E-liability carbon accounting method to calculate the total emissions produced from manufacturing and transporting syringes to hospital sites, and from their subsequent use and disposal. The article describes the steps followed to calculate accurate product-level embedded emissions across the two entities. The study found, as expected, that the emissions produced at each entity were much lower than those produced by their suppliers of materials, electricity, and transportation services. Senior managers at both participating entities concurred that product-level emissions data from the E-liability calculations reveal multiple opportunities for lowering their carbon footprint. Although the study focused only on a single supplier of a single product category (syringes) sold to a single customer, its methodology is generalizable to multiple suppliers of multiple products sold to multiple customers. It can also be used to calculate the product and operational emissions from treating a patient's medical condition.