The Benefits of Carbon Calculation

In this blog, Dr Claire Cieluch shares how her practice has harnessed the Vet Sustain Carbon Calculator to measure their carbon footprint, identify key emission sources, and implement impactful changes.

We have used the Vet Sustain carbon calculator to quantify our practice carbon footprint annually over the last two years. The calculator is extremely straightforward and intuitive to use.

The accompanying resources including instructional videos and the data collection checklist are really helpful in guiding you through the process. It took a bit of legwork to gather all the data needed but once we had collected this the calculation was very easy to perform.

At my practice we have used our carbon footprint results to help understand the different areas of our veterinary business and how they contribute to our carbon emissions. This has been really helpful in guiding development of our sustainability action plan, allowing us to make targeted changes to the areas which will have the biggest impact in terms of our overall emissions.

We identified that refrigerants and anaesthetic gases made up a huge proportion of our annual emissions. We used this data to target changes, namely the introduction of lower flow general anaesthetic techniques and a sustainable heating and cooling policy to try to lower emissions. We hope that this will not only reduce our carbon footprint but also reduce our business costs. By reducing waste volatile anaesthetic agent we should save a considerable amount financially by needing to purchase less. Likewise, our less intensive use of heating and air conditioning units with the new policy will reduce electricity usage and refrigerant leakage and hopefully result in further cost savings.

We also introduced other measures to reduce our energy consumption including a 'switch off' campaign to encourage the habit of turning lights and equipment off routinely. Between the two years we have measured our carbon footprint so far, our energy usage has significantly decreased as a result of the measures that we have implemented.

The results of the waste section of our carbon footprint in 2022 identified a large contribution to emissions from clinical waste streams. In an effort to combat this the practice green team ran an educational campaign to encourage correct waste segregation. We also placed more receptacles for recycling around the practice to make recycling easier and introduced a separate food waste stream.

I'm looking forward to performing next year's carbon footprint calculation so that we can see the impact our changes have made to our emissions and consider the ongoing changes that we can make for the future.

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To find out more about getting started with our veterinary specific carbon calculator please visit our resources page: https://vetsustain.org/resourc...