Counting down to an energy-neutral 2030 fun and less fun facts

Sustainability is hot. There is little doubt on the urgency of the matter. Emissions from the healthcare sector constitute 7% of the CO₂ footprint of the Netherlands. At the Radboudumc, an institution concerned with health, innovation, and science, it’s more than logical that we play our part. So, how sustainable is the Radboudumc now? What needs to change, and where should we start? And for the skeptics: can our small actions make a difference? To try and answer these questions, we went on a quest for some facts and figures.

Slowly improving

The first person we talked to was Harriette Laurijsen, our sustainability advisor. She sent us a huge Excel file full of estimations, calculations, and graphs on the CO₂ footprint of the hospital. In 2019, Radboudumc generated 54,284 tons of CO₂. Let’s put this number into perspective. It amounts to the total energy use of 6264 average homes for a year, and we would need to grow 897,597 tree seeds for 10 years to sequester that CO₂. Most of this footprint comes from electricity and gas usage, followed by transportation. Although the numbers look terrifying, the 2019 emission is 5,3% lower from the year before and 11,1% from 2016, which is something to be celebrated. Undoubtedly, we need energy for patient care and research, which are vital services to society. Still, there is a lot of room to make changes and reduce our footprint.

What goes around does not come around.

The impact calculations consider the medical material, energy, and water that enter the institution, are transformed in medical intervention, and “leave” us again. Luckily, one outcome is the increase in well-being for the outgoing patient. Realistically though, most of what comes in leaves as waste. Radboudumc employs around 11,000 people and is visited by almost half a million patients each year. Naturally, a lot of waste is produced. To put it in numbers, over 2000 tons every year. Only about 25% of this waste is recyclable or reusable. It’s up to us to rethink and reduce the purchase and consumption of materials that are hard to deal with as waste or replace them with more sustainable ones.

What about research?

An average lab space consumes up to 10 times more energy per m² than a standard office space. Labs are also the source of almost 2% of all plastic waste. One could say that we’ve got rather detailed estimations on the impact of Radboudumc’s health service-related activities. But when it comes to the effects of research-related activities, things get complicated. Unfortunately, the necessary data is not collected and stored neatly. We had to play the roles of investigative journalists and pester many people to get some data. After many e-mails, phone calls, and detailed reading of webpages and product specifications, this is what we learned.

A challenging investigation

The first big struggle was distilling the numbers on research activities from the rest. To illustrate this point, take the fascinating story of the servers. Radboud University has its own data center. There, in a place called “Forum”, we find the servers allocated to the Radboudumc. For the entire Forum, the annual consumption of 2019 was 1.824.230 kWh. Not all servers in the room are ours, but we know that the UMC alone used 690.000 kWh: that’s 37.8%. However, there is no way to know how much of this comes from research activities, which means that we can’t evaluate the research-related server consumption. Are we doing better or worse than similar institutions? We cannot know at the moment. And imagine we wanted to take measures to reduce impact. We wouldn’t know whether and how well they work.

The second hurdle was getting order overviews. We heard that the logistics department has a database of all orders placed. And we thought it would be a piece of cake. After ten e-mails (that is, around 40 g of CO2) going back and forth for almost two months to have an accessible overview of server use or material orders and intake, we were still practically empty-handed.

Even so, we didn’t want to give up just yet. After trying three different reference numbers, we got a simple but illustrative example. In October 2020, when we were not running at full capacity, the RIMLS ordered 23,500 50mL and 10,500 15mL falcon tubes. Suppose we assume that we are 100 wet-lab people per floor; that makes 700 people (we skip the ground floor). We obtain the number of 33 50mL falcons per person in only one month.

Next, we moved to machinery. Having spent the summer learning about the energy consumption of freezers, we decided to spend the autumn learning about microscopes. The microscopy facility owns 28 microscopes: 4 electron microscopes and 2 atomic force microscopes. The rest are confocal, wide-field or specialized, and super-resolution microscopes. Each one of them is on for an average of 1500 hours each year. Let’s take a Leica SP5 confocal microscope, which should be halfway through the range of sophistication. According to the manufacturer, it has a maximal power consumption of 3.6 kW. That’s 12 times as much as a plasma TV. Assuming consumption over time to be 3 kWh, it is already more than the consumption of a whole home kitchen. Let’s do a little game: you can try to do similar estimations for the most sophisticated microscopes at the facility.

Lessons learned and looking forward

Throughout this whole endeavour, the most important lesson that we learned is that the data regarding energy consumption and CO₂ emission must be compiled and analysed meticulously, taking research-related activities into account separately, and shared publicly in an accessible way. The Radboudumc has participated in the country-wide green deal since 2015, aiming to cut healthcare-related CO₂ emission by 49% until 2030. The Radboudumc is aiming to be  energy-neutral by then. That’s great news, and everyone should know. However, it has been very challenging to access tangible and specific data about these sustainability efforts, especially when it comes to research activities.

We would therefore advise: let’s communicate. Make annual reports concise and accessible to international colleagues, involve researchers, and be transparent about the problems we should be solving together. There are great examples to turn to including Utrecht University’s detailed CO₂ footprint report and University of Twente’s impressive website displaying real-time energy data of each building. Let’s not only talk, but really communicate. Let’s first act, and then show that we too stand out, and are an important contributor to the sustainability race.

So, what actions is the Radboudumc taking exactly? How can we personally help? We will answer these questions in our next blog posts. Stay tuned!

Blog by Özlem Bulut, Estel Collado Camps and Ilona Kessels