As Kermit the Frog says, ‘it’s not easy bein’ green’. We all know that this is the case in a busy veterinary practice, and even more so in the time of Covid. But it is easy to tackle small individual tasks, and before long you have built yourself a ‘Green Machine’ from all those parts.
I work at Crown Vets in Inverness and, inspired by a webinar from Ellie West at Davies Vets, I decided to set up a sustainability group in our practice. I thought it was important to email the whole team to find like minded individuals so that we could tackle areas right across the clinic. The ‘Green Machine’ – comprising myself (a vet), Sarah (a nurse) and Charlotte (an ACA) – was born and we had a lot of work to do.
Almost all of the organisational credit has to go to Sarah and Charlotte who diligently set about writing a long list of all the things we could change, and it was these bite size pieces that allowed us to steadily make progress. We looked at the different areas of the practice and focused on 3 broad areas – ‘through the back’, ‘the office’ and ‘the staff room’, and we made sure to fully cost out each of our suggested changes before getting the go-ahead from management. We are about 18 months into our journey so far and looking back it’s actually hard to remember when we didn’t use cloth scrub hats or get our milk delivered in glass bottles!
To get you started here are some ideas, from our ‘‘to-do’ list to yours.
- Switched to cardboard boxes instead of plastic bags for dispensing medication.
- Changed to syringes, buster collars and medicine bottles that use less plastic or are made from recycled plastic. (think BD Emerald or Greencol)
- Started distilling our own water instead of buying it in plastic bottles.
- Constructed eco-bricks from some of our un-recyclable plastic. (look for local initiatives to send them to – ours helped to build a community garden)
- Use our cloth scrub hats. (from All Scrubbed Up of course!)
- Use bamboo toothbrushes to clean clippers and bamboo cotton buds to clean ears.
- Use reusable nail picks when scrubbing up for surgery.
- Tightened up our stock control to reduce drug wastage. (and save £££ on out of date stock!)
- Recycled 17.5kgs of gloves, facemasks and hairnets with TerraCycle- the same weight as 3 Westies! (bare in mind this isn’t one of their free services so it can be costly)
In the office we:
- Changed all printers to automatically print double sided and in grey-scale
- Switched to sustainably sourced paper.
- Recycle our ink cartridges.
- Added extra recycling bins for waste paper.
In the staff room we:
- Switched to glass milk bottles that are collected and reused.
- Collected 9.5kgs of crisp packets for recycling through TerraCycle in conjunction with our local primary school – the same weight as 3 cats!
- Collected 88kgs of plastic bottle tops for recycling with Lush – the same weight as 4 large Collies!
- On top of all that we have also become a public drop off point for a pet food packaging recycling scheme with TerraCycle. We have sent away 115kgs of pet food packaging for recycling – the same weight as 2 Newfoundlands! Unfortunately this is on hold for now due to Covid-19 but we will get back to it when we can.
These might all seem like fairly small and fairly trivial changes to make but not only do they play their individual part, they all contribute to a culture change within the practice and within the team. The most striking representation of this is that our industrial sized general waste bin used to be overflowing with stuff destined for landfill but now sits half empty whilst our recycling bin has to be emptied twice as often! This is all down to a change in our collective habits here at Crown and I am confident that when you start your own sustainability journey you will see the power of your own ‘Green Machine’ too.
Top tips:
- Try and engage the whole practice if you can, you will be amazed at how keen people are and the ideas that they have.
- Break it down into small, manageable steps.
- Lead by example and give gentle reminders – nobody likes a preachy eco warrior but will happily adjust if you make it easy for them.
- Always keep management in the loop to make sure your green initiatives are not suddenly way more expensive than the alternatives.
- Update your social media – your clients will be really interested in your sustainability efforts and it’s great to inspire them too.
- Contact your suppliers – they will be more than happy to point you in the direction of their more eco-friendly products, most have ‘green’ sections to their websites now and you might even be asked to be guinea pig for some of their newer eco items.
- Enjoy the little wins like when a colleague asks you which bin something goes in, or proudly presents their beeswax wrapped sandwiches!’
Written by Sam Smith – Crown Vets Inverness