June 23rd, 2022

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Join our Board of Directors

Nearly all non-profit organisations in Canada are led by a volunteer Board of Directors and the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care (the Coalition) is no exception. We rely heavily on strong leadership to help us drive sustainable change in Canada’s health sector. 

The Coalition’s Board of Directors provides leadership to senior leaders and helps guide our strategic direction.  

If you are interested in volunteering as a Coalition Board Member, first consider your interests, and the skills and experience you could bring to a Board position.  

Are environmental stewardship and planetary health of interest to you? Do you see yourself as a leader who can provide guidance to Canada’s premier integrated green health care alliance? Then we encourage you to to reach out directly to our Executive Director Neil Ritchie ([email protected]) providing a brief profile highlighting your areas of expertise and/or interest and a short paragraph detailing why you feel you would be an awesome new Board Member of the Coalition.

"Do No Harm"... Is that it? Let's build more sustainable health care. A clinicians guide for advocacy. 

On June 28th at 7:30PM ET join the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care and PEACH Health Ontario as we host a virtual presentation by Stuart Elgie (Architect, OAA, MRIAC). 

This webinar will:

• Seek to define sustainability terms and frameworks such as LEED and WELL,
• Provide some context for sustainability in the health care built environment in Ontario and British Columbia,
• Identify emerging trends for sustainable health care design,
• Provide insight into the design and project implementation process to leverage clinical advocacy.

Questions and discussion will be welcome.

Properly disposing of medical waste plays a role in climate change 

Healthcare Facilities Today 

Health care facility managers play an important role in ensuring organisations function properly. The way managers handle medical waste planning can have a direct impact on employees’ physical and mental wellbeing, as well as the environment. Managers need to prioritize education on ways to properly dispose of medical waste in a sustainable and safe way so facilities remain efficient and compliant. 

According to the World Health Organisation, 85 percent of all medical waste generated is typically non-hazardous in nature, but most of it is disposed of by burning and incineration. This approach draws concerns because medical waste is responsible for a bulk of all particulate matter, dioxins and furans emissions. In addition, improperly managed waste can increase the risk of injuries and spread disease.

Government of Canada delivers on commitment to ban harmful single-use plastics 

Cision

The Minister of Environment and Climate Change, the Honourable Steven Guilbeault, and the Minister of Health, the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, have published final regulations to prohibit single-use plastics including:

• checkout bags;
• cutlery;
• foodservice ware made from or containing problematic plastics that are hard to recycle;
• ring carriers;
• stir sticks; and
• straws (with some exceptions).

The ban on the manufacture and import of these harmful single-use plastics, barring a few targeted exceptions to recognize specific cases, will come into effect in December 2022. To provide businesses in Canada with enough time to transition and to deplete their existing stocks, the sale of these items will be prohibited as of December 2023. 

WA hired a climate epidemiologist - and not a moment too soon

Crosscut

Washington state health experts have recognized for years that climate change does and will continue to negatively impact our health. Public health agencies such as King County’s have created climate health planning documents, and in 2019 the Washington State Department of Health created a specific team related to climate health.  But marrying climate and health data to figure out exactly how floods, fires and other phenomena spurred by climate change affect our bodies takes resources that have been scarce within local, state and federal health agencies.

However, the state now stands to gain more insight into these relationships, thanks to the State Health Department’s new hire: the state’s first official climate change epidemiologist.

Climate change epidemiologists try to determine how the climate affects health outcomes within a population. This information is practical and necessary for lots of parties, including hospital administrators, city planners, local health officers and utility managers, all of whom need the information to help their organisations adapt.

Major B.C trauma hospital switches anesthetic gas to reduce carbon footprint

CBC

Canada's health-care system accounts for about five per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, but anesthesiologists at Royal Columbian Hospital (RCH) in New Westminster, B.C., are moving to curb their surgical unit's carbon footprint.

Patients going under the knife at RCH will no longer be put to sleep with desflurane — a highly potent pollutant that RCH anesthesiologists say has 25 times more greenhouse gas emissions than its alternative, sevoflurane. 

The hospital, one of B.C.'s biggest and busiest, will also return to the manufacturer vaporizers used to administer the gas.

Eagle Ridge Hospital, a smaller acute care facility in neighbouring Port Moody, will also ban the anesthetic.

Dr. Cedric Ho, an anesthesiologist at Royal Columbian and Eagle Ridge hospitals, acknowledges both desflurane and sevoflurane have global warming potential, but the differences between their climate impacts are stark. 

Signed, sealed and 212 steps towards delivering the world’s first net zero health service

NHS

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

NRCan opens new call for proposals to fund zero-emission public, on-street, multi-unit residential building or fleet refeulling infrastructure

Electric Autonomy

Natural Resources Canada is once again opening a round of funding through the Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program (ZEVIP) to support electric and hydrogen refuelling projects across Canada.

Eligible projects in the current request for proposals (RFPs) call-out include: public, on-street, multi-unit residential building, workplace (not including home offices) or fleet vehicle refuelling infrastructure.

Each project may be funded up to 50 per cent of the total cost to a maximum of $5 million per project and a maximum of $2 million per project for delivery organisations.

B.C's Nano One buys $10.25 -million cathode active material facility in Quebec, inks deal with BASF for battery development

Electric Autonomy

Nano One, a Burnaby-headquartered battery technology company, made sister announcements last month that could have interesting implications for Canada’s electric vehicle battery supply chain.

On May 25, Nano One announced that for $10.25 million they take over by the end of 2022 Johnson Matthey Battery Materials (JMBM) — a Quebec lithium-iron phosphate cathode active material maker that supplies the lithium-ion battery market, including tier one automakers.

Nano One was originally formed in 2011 under the name Perfect Lithium. The company and JMBM had been working together in a joint development agreement since June 2021 for “nickel-rich advanced cathode materials.”

Take the green energy quiz

Bullfrog energy

How flooring acts as a mode of infection transmission 

Hospital Facilities Today 

A recent article entitled, “Floors May Be Under-appreciated Source of Contamination” states in part, “Although hospital floors have been considered inconsequential in the spread of health care-associated infections (HAIs), research finds that floors are responsible for spreading pathogens to high-touch items that are dropped or stored on the floor.”  

The study was conducted in five U.S. hospitals without the knowledge of hospital personnel. Cleaners washed the floors of occupied patient rooms using quaternary ammonium-based disinfectant only when they were visibly soiled or when a patient was discharged. Researchers then took cultured samples of the floor to check them for pathogens.  

They found traces of C. diff on the floors, along with methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE).

N.B. hospital recognized for energy efficiency commitment

Country 94

A New Brunswick hospital is being recognized nationally for its commitment to energy efficiency.

The Saint John Regional Hospital (SJRH) has received an ENERGY STAR®

Canada Award in the “Building of the Year – Hospital” category.

The awards recognize businesses and organisations that have made outstanding contributions to protecting the environment through superior energy achievements.

“Horizon is proud to maintain a culture that promotes environmental sustainability and stewardship, while reducing waste, emissions and improving energy efficiency across our organisation, and receiving this ENERGY STAR award provides further validation of this commitment,” Jeff Carter, Horizon VP Capital Assets, Infrastructure and Operations, said in a news release.

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

Smart Cities: Making transportation accessible and inclusive

Autocrypt and Electric Autonomy Canada are excited to share an invitation to a virtual panel discussion on Smart Cities, increasing accessibility for public transportation

Transportation services are evolving rapidly. Powered by new technologies and the post-pandemic expectation of flexibility, the transit service of tomorrow does not resemble the transit services of two years ago. 

In this panel discussion, they explore how connected, intelligent and inclusive transportation benefits these communities and, by ripple effect, all communities. Safely and securely managed data will help transit agencies become smarter and bring efficiency to the urban, suburban and rural roads they operate on.

Date: June 21st, 2022

Time: 1:00pm ET

REGISTER HERE

Canadian Green Building 2022 Awards 

Register to attend the SABMag 2022 Canadian Green Building Awards Winner Presentation event on ZOOM.

Attend to see the full visual description of the 11 winning projects - from large institutional and commercial projects to a 1940s single family home converted to a Passive House duplex - and to acknowledge the winning design teams.

Date: June 29th, 2022

Time: 2:00PM ET

Attend this educational and inspirational event by replying to [email protected]. They will send you the information to join the event.

RETScreen® is a Clean Energy Management Software system for energy efficiency, renewable energy and cogeneration project feasibility analysis as well as ongoing energy performance analysis.

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