Development of an Approach to Assess the Life Cycle Environmental Impacts and Costs of General Hospitals through the Analysis of a Belgian Case

Milena Stevanovic,Stéphane Vermeulen,Karen Allacker

doi:10.3390/su11030856

Abstract

With the aim of moving towards a more sustainable society, hospital buildings are challenged to decrease their environmental impact while continuing to offer affordable and qualitative medical care. The aim of this paper was to gain insight into the main drivers of the environmental impacts and costs of healthcare facilities, and to identify methodological obstacles for a quantitative assessment. More specifically, the objective was to assess the environmental and financial impacts of the general hospital Sint Maarten in Mechelen (Belgium) by using a life cycle approach. The hospital building was analyzed based on a combination of a simplified life cycle assessment and life cycle costing. The “MMG+_KULeuven” assessment tool was used for the calculation of environmental impacts and financial costs. The study revealed that the environmental impact was mainly caused by electricity use for appliances and lighting, cleaning processes, material production, and spatial heating, while building construction and electricity use caused the highest financial costs. The most relevant impact categories identified were global warming, eutrophication, acidification, human toxicity (cancer and non-cancer effects), and particulate matter. Various methodological challenges were identified, such as the adaptation of existing methods to ensure applicability to hospital buildings and the extraction of data from a Revit model.

Highlights

Hospital buildings play a major role in healing people, yet at the same time they are highly dependent on natural resources and cause significant environmental burdens due to, amongst others, greenhouse gas emissions, waste production, regular renovation due to technological innovations, and daily cleaning
Screening life cycle assessment (LCA) provides a quick overview of the environmental impacts of a building, without requiring high quality data and large amounts of time
The mix is dominated by nuclear and electricity from natural gas, with the latter being responsible for the highest amount of environmental impact in the global warming category

Summary

Introduction

Hospital buildings play a major role in healing people, yet at the same time they are highly dependent on natural resources and cause significant environmental burdens due to, amongst others, greenhouse gas emissions, waste production, regular renovation due to technological innovations, and daily cleaning. European hospitals with their supply chains are responsible for 5% of the yearly CO2 emissions in Europe [1]. In the past decade, an increased interest has been noticed in reducing the negative impacts of hospitals, these settings seem to fail to address sustainability issues fully [2]. McGain and Naylor acknowledged the importance of future research in the areas of measuring hospital environmental ‘footprints’, technological, clinical and organizational innovations, social aspects and psychological research, policy research, and assessing the effects of environmental and climate change on health [3]

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Conclusion