As our planet’s population continues to grow, so does the sustainable growth rate of the dialysis patient population. The dialysis patient population growth annual rate is now expected to be 6 percent, making it a 4 million patient population by 2025. As the number of patients on dialysis continues to grow, so does the amount of natural resources consumed and waste produced by dialysis facilities.
The environmental impact of dialysis is staggering. In general terms, the 120,000 healthcare facilities in the United States, of which over 5,000 are dialysis clinics, generate 5 million tons of solid waste annually and consume 515 trillion BTUs of electricity per year—11 percent of all commercial consumption. In the more specific terms of dialysis, the 5,000 dialysis clinics in the United States alone (which represents 26 percent of the global dialysis market) perform over 50 million dialysis treatments per year, consuming over 5 trillion liters of fresh water per year from its 325,000 patients in 2007.
The disposal of single-use dialyzers and bloodlines will result in over 2.5 billion dialyzers and blood lines, which represent over 7 billion pounds of carbon-based medical devices that will end up in community landfills over the next 25 years. These numbers alone point to the very question of long term sustainability of these critical healthcare services given their large thirst for natural resources (water, electricity, fossil fuel-based medical devices) and resulting large solid waste disposal volumes. And so some dialysis facilities are quick to enact environmental initiatives all in the name of sustainability; the meeting of the current needs of dialysis without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the average healthcare facility’s carbon emissions are more than 40 times greater than that of an average office building, with more than 16 million pounds of carbon dioxide released annually into the atmosphere. Moreover, dialysis centers’ water consumption is over 200 times greater than that of an average office building. And healthcare facilities are supposed to be healthy places! Given statistics like these, everyone’s talking about “going green” these days, but amid all the hype it’s easy to forget the real point. Greening healthcare and dialysis is not about being trendy, it is about adopting an end-to-end, cradle to grave healthcare process that treads as lightly on the planet as possible while also reducing costs.
