July 7th, 2022

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Climate smart health care solutions: Reusable Respirators 

Join the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care as we host the President of the Canadian Association of PPE Manufacturers (CAPPEM) and representatives from Dentec Safety and PADM Medical, Canadian manufacturers of reusable respirators, as they share their perspectives on the status of reusable elastomeric respirators in Canada.

The webinar will begin with a presentation from the Coalition summarizing recent research findings on reusable respirators from our Reducing Health Care-Related PPE and Medical Single Use Plastic Waste Through Circular Economy Principles project, funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada.

This is an exciting opportunity for anyone who has questions for manufacturers of reusable respirators. Our goal is to encourage a conversation between health care workers and reusable PPE suppliers.

Meet our newest Sustainability Champion** - Swenco!

Swenco Medical was established to address the need for domestically made Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), caused by the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020. Their parent company, Swenco Limited, has 60 years of experience manufacturing high quality safety products and PPE products to the Canadian health care community that are fully protective and that have a positive impact on the environment.

They have worked with Innovation partners, like Precision ADM (PADM) Medical in Winnipeg, to develop masks that keep people safe, in an environmentally-friendly way. To combat the rise of single-use plastic PPE waste, they have changed the raw materials used in the production of masks from polypropylene to PADM Medical's revolutionary plant-based mask material. This material is made from crops grown in Canada that are converted to biopolymers. Over their life cycle, the masks will account for 55% less carbon emissions than traditional masks, without compromising on safety.

**If your for-profit organisation has made a serious corporate commitment to making health care more sustainable, you too can become recognized as a green health  2022 Sustainability Champion by the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care.

Canada's first National Adaptation Strategy - join the conversation!

Fog catchers: improving Mexico's climate resilience using traditional knowledge

Climate Home News

A Mexican climate resilience project is adopting the traditional practice of fog catching to address the impacts of water scarcity.

Using fine mesh that has a high capacity for moisture absorption, the structure retains water particles during foggy nights which, when condensed, falls into a central trough connected to a reservoir container.

Driven by the Indigenous community, the technique is just one of a number of ancestral methods the project is harnessing to combat climate change vulnerability in the state of Oaxaca.

The fog catching technique aims to help relieve some of the burdens caused by water stress.Originally established in Peru, the structures can capture three to five litres of water per square metre a night, depending on the humidity of the area.

The public health crisis is planetary - and nursing is crucial to addressing it

American Public Health Association

In September 2021, more than 200 global nursing, medical, pharmacy, dental, and public health journals issued a joint statement titled, “Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health.”

Its authors wrote: "As health professionals, we must do all we can to aid the transition to a sustainable, fairer, resilient, and healthier world. Alongside acting to reduce the harm from the environmental crisis, we should proactively contribute to global prevention of further damage and action on the root causes of the crisis."

To accomplish these goals, we must work collaboratively to redesign our current model, shifting from illness care to health care based on principles of planetary health.

Action guidance for addressing pollution from inhalational anaesthetics

Association of Anesthetists

Pollution mitigation represents an important opportunity for much needed leadership from the health community, addressing a threat that will directly and seriously impact the health and well-being of current and future generations.

Inhalational anaesthetics are a significant contributor to health care-related greenhouse gas emissions and minimising their climate impact represents a meaningful and achievable intervention.

A challenge exists in translating well-established knowledge about inhalational anaesthetic pollution into practical action.

CODA is a medical education and health promotion charity that aims to deliver climate action-oriented recommendations, supported by useful resources and success stories. The action guidance for addressing pollution from inhalational anaesthetics is the subject of this article.

Fossil-fuel pollution and climate change - A new NEJM group series

The New England Journal of Medicine

In September 2021, the New England Journal of Medicine and more than 200 other health journals worldwide published a joint editorial calling for urgent action to limit greenhouse gas emissions to protect human health, adding to growing demands from around the globe. Yet nine months later, global greenhouse gas emissions — predominantly driven by fossil-fuel combustion — continue to rise as the responses required are debated or ignored.

In the United States, the country that has the greatest cumulative emissions historically and is the largest producer of oil and gas, greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly returning to pre-pandemic levels and are growing faster than the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, recent U.S. pledges to promptly decarbonize are incompatible with current policies and practices, including issuing new lease permits for fossil-fuel drilling and allowing continued construction of new pipelines, which lock in future emissions and their associated health harms.

FOOD SYSTEMS

Scientists are pursuing flood-resistant crops, thanks to climate-induced heavy rains and other extreme weather

Inside Climate News

Last week, heavy rains in Yellowstone National Park wiped out miles of roads, closing the park and swamping nearby Billings, Montana. This week, heavy monsoons and flooding impacted millions of people in Bangladesh and India, causing fatalities. Record rainfall in southeastern China also caused a deluge, resulting in landslides and evacuations.

Flooding claims lives, ruins infrastructure and threatens agriculture—and jeopardizes food security.

Now, new research could aid farmers in the eye of the storm. A study by Utrecht University researchers, published in May in Plant Physiology, identifies a possible way to increase flood resistance in crops by treating them with ethylene, a compound produced by plants that helps with growth and ripening.

Researchers hope the findings will translate to better climate resilience in the global food supply.

The environmental limits of eating local

Vox

Over the last 20 years, eating locally produced food has become synonymous  with eating more ethically, healthily, and sustainably.

Locavorism has been touted by popular  food writers, local governments, think tanks, and big environmental nonprofits, sold as one clear change that could help to heal our ailing, industrialized food system. It would do so by revitalizing local agricultural economies, supporting small farmers, getting more nutritious and fresher products to people inundated with fast food, and helping the planet by reducing “food miles” — the distance food travels, and the energy that process consumes, to get to your plate.

Some research suggests the rise of farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, in which farmers regularly deliver food to consumers’ doorsteps, has helped to improve the health of those who patronize them, and can benefit local agricultural economies. But a primarily local-based diet is still rare in the US; local food accounts for only around 1.5 percent of total US food sales.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

How accessible are EV charging stations across Canada? How much does it cost to operate an EV vs. gas vehicle?

CBC News

Although an EV might still cost you more to buy than a gas-powered one, it'll cost you less to run. According to a 2022 analysis of the ownership costs of popular car models by Clean Energy Canada, the cost of operating an electric vehicle was lower — often much lower — than its gas equivalent, with only one exception among the models analyzed.

An average EV will cost up to $5 to $12 to go from empty to full in Canada, said Joanna Kyriazis, clean transportation program manager at Clean Energy Canada.

"You're looking at about $16 to go 100 kilometres [on gas] ... where an electric vehicle uses about 20 kilowatt [hours] of energy to do the same," said David Giles, EV technical specialist and founder of All EV Canada, a Canadian EV experts group.

To move an EV 100 kilometres, he said, the price would be closer to $2.

Global electric car sales have continued their strong growth in 2022 after breaking records last year

IEA

Electric car sales powered through 2021 and have remained strong so far in 2022, but ensuring future growth will demand greater efforts to diversify battery manufacturing and critical mineral supplies to reduce the risks of bottlenecks and price rises, according to the International Energy Agency.

Sales of electric cars (including fully electric and plug-in hybrids) doubled in 2021 to a new record of 6.6 million, with more now sold each week than in the whole of 2012, according to the latest edition of the annual Global Electric Vehicle Outlook. 

Despite strains along global supply chains, sales kept rising strongly into 2022, with 2 million electric cars sold worldwide in the first quarter, up by three-quarters from the same period a year earlier. The number of electric cars on the world’s roads by the end of 2021 was about 16.5 million, triple the amount in 2018.

PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT

Disposable hospital gowns could expose health workers to infection

Scientific American

Disposable gowns designed to deflect the splatter of bodily fluids, used in thousands of U.S. hospitals, have underperformed in recent and ongoing laboratory tests and may fall short of safety standards, leaving health care workers with a greater risk of infection than advertised.

A peer-reviewed academic study, published to little notice amid the coronavirus pandemic, found that isolation gowns commonly worn in medical units or intensive care units ripped too easily and allowed about four to 14 times the expected amount of liquid to seep through when sprayed or splashed.

“I’m amazed that facilities are using them,” said study co-author Elizabeth Easter, a textile expert at the University of Kentucky, of the thinnest disposable gowns. “Because, technically, you can see through the fabric.”

A clunky mask may be the answer to airborne disease and N95 waste

The New York Times

In the early 1990s, long before PPE, N95 and asymptomatic transmission became household terms, federal health officials issued guidelines for how medical workers should protect themselves from tuberculosis during a resurgence of the highly infectious respiratory disease.

Their recommendation, elastomeric respirators, an industrial-grade face mask familiar to car painters and construction workers, would in the decades that followed become the gold standard for infection-control specialists focused on the dangers of airborne pathogens.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promoted them during the SARS outbreak of 2003 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. A few studies since then have suggested that reusable elastomeric respirators should be essential gear for frontline medical workers during a respiratory pandemic, which experts predicted would quickly deplete supplies of N95s, the disposable filtration masks largely made in China.

Near real-time hourly weather data is now available directly within the latest version of RETScreen Software’s Performance Analysis module. As part of our ongoing collaboration with NASA, you can now download hourly weather data for the entire surface of the planet!

Click here to download RETScreen Expert

Installing 50,000 Ev chargers by 2026: The roadmap for the task ahead 

For Canada to lead in the transition to electric vehicles, it’s essential that we have high quality charging infrastructure that is intelligently planned and well managed.

A massive increase in EV charger deployments will be required to meet the anticipated surge in sales of EVs as automakers roll out deliveries of their new electrified products.

In this panel discussion, they will explore the answers to some key hurdles for EV charging infrastructure and what needs to be done to ensure it meets the needs of all EV drivers

Date: July 14th, 2022

Time: 1:00pm ET

REGISTER HERE

Global change-makers speaker series: Strengths-based nursing 

Join your fellow nurse leaders from around the world on July 13, 2022, for our second annual global check-in on the Strengths-Based Nursing and Healthcare (SBNH) movement!

SBNH is a philosophy and value-driven approach that grounds nursing education at McGill University in Montreal Canada to this day.

To start off, the keynote speaker, will share her reflections on Strengths-Based Leadership during the ongoing pandemic. A moderated panel of nurse leaders immersed in the SBNH approach in different countries will then share highlights of their own experiences during the challenging COVID-19 years.

Date: July 13th, 2022

Time: 11:00am - 2:00pm ET

LEARN HOW TO REGISTER

Applied circular economy: Zero waste buildings 

The green building sector is the largest employer in Vancouver’s ‘green economy’ and with $16B in construction delivered in BC annually and the trend towards low-impact building, this share will only increase.

This online course will train professionals who can deliver the low-impact buildings needed to achieve net-zero targets.

The microcredential will consist of three courses:  Deconstruction (material recovery and working with salvage); Design for Disassembly (the principles of DfD and Cradle to Cradle (C2C); and Construction Material Flow Analysis  (understanding the industry and the path of materials through it).

APPLY NOW

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