The latest initiative focuses on recycling efforts at the Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center (PMC) restaurant and the main kitchen. Plates, utensils, drinking bottles, and uneaten food are all separated into bins designated for the landfill or some aspect of recycling. The collected food waste was initially taken to a biofuel company in Trenton and converted to renewable energy. It is now being trucked to a nearby farm that uses it as feed for livestock or grinds it into mulch.
“PMC collected 1 ½ tons of food waste in the first three weeks of the program,” says Greg Evans, Penn Medicine’s Corporate Director of Sustainability. At that rate, PMC will collect 26 tons over a full year, which amounts to 52,000 pounds of food waste — a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions — diverted from the landfill.
Other Efforts Continue
In 2022, Princeton Health more than doubled its collection, sterilizing, and reprocessing of single-use medical devices, such as pulse oximeters, leads and cables, and various surgical supplies. PMC and its ambulatory surgery centers also continued efforts to use sustainable fluid solidifiers and banned the use of the anesthetic desflurane, a particularly harmful greenhouse gas.
Another ongoing initiative is the introduction of stabilized aqueous ozone (SAO) cleaning technology in the Environmental Services Department of PMC. The SAO system adds oxygen to tap water to create an effective cleaning and sanitizing solution without harmful chemicals.
There are plans to increase the use of SAO at PMC and other Princeton Health locations before expanding to other Penn Medicine entities.
One initiative that has already extended across Penn Medicine is the measurement of carbon emissions to calculate a total for the entire University of Pennsylvania Health System. The figure will serve as a baseline to develop a multi-year strategy to reduce emissions and meet systemwide sustainability goals.