A major contributor to the waste stream in healthcare facilities is paper. All types of paper, be it newspapers, junk mail, and the always common white printer paper can and should be properly segregated and disposed of.
The overall management of paper output of a facility can lead to significant savings in waste disposal costs. Close to 3% of a facility's gross revenue can come from internal printing.
The first key to proper management of paper in your facility is to reduce the amount and variety of items that are printed daily. Working with your IT department to set all printers and copiers to duplex printing can prevent large amounts of unnecessary paper usage.
Another way to prevent paper from being unnecessarily printed is to look at the daily reports that are printed out at your facility. Many areas of a healthcare facility automatically generate printed reports on a daily basis. Many of these reports have been generated for over five years, and some of them are no longer necessary. We have seen that these unnecessary reports can add up to several reams of paper wasted per day at a facility. Again, working with IT and the department managers can eliminate unnecessary reports from being printed. That can go a long way in saving paper at your facility.
The nature of the healthcare field necessitates that paper waste is still produced on a large scale. The way we go about managing this waste stream can go a long way in helping the environment, and reducing your bottom line disposal costs.
A significant amount of the paper produced at a facility can be considered confidential. Items that contain patient information, and other sensitive materials must be disposed of in a locked, confidential paper console. These consoles, which are available from several vendors, are normally serviced by the selected vendor's technicians weekly, with the contents of the consoles shredded and eventually recycled.
These systems are excellent in protecting your facility from privacy and HIPAA violations, but the consoles are commonly used to dispose of non-confidential items. A console shredding service can cost up to four times per pound more than single-stream recycling disposal.
Think of the non-confidential items that may be on your desk - an old brochure, a recent article, an out-dated to-do list. For some of our clients, we have begun a process of collecting the non-confidential paper like this that would normally end up in the confidential paper console, or in the regular landfill waste stream.
The program uses unique paper collection containers, and we offer a series of education sessions for office areas that produce large volumes of paper. The non-confidential paper that is collected is placed in our recycling waste stream, ensuring that it is properly disposed of, while keeping costs down from reducing our confidential paper shredding costs.
Utilizing these methods to reduce and properly dispose of the paper output in your facility can pay large dividends in environmental responsibility and disposal costs.
Bill Griffith is the president of Reduction in Motion, which works with organizations throughout the mid-Atlantic region to rethink waste management from start to finish.