Sigh.  Life sure can be lonely here at Energy & Environment.  Sure, there’s me and Lisa, UHN’s Energy Steward.  And our six Waste Teams.  And our half-dozen Energy Teams.  And our almost 600 Green Team members.  And the thousands of UHNers who help green the hospital every day.

But sometimes that’s not enough.

Sometimes you want to say things like, “we’re working with our GPO to put some EPP in an RFP to get DEHP out of our IVs” and not have people look at you like you’ve inspected one too many recycling bins.

Sometimes you want to be in a room of people who get just as excited as you do when looking at a multi-coloured pie-chart entitled “breakdown of waste characterization from an audit on an inpatient unit in a large teaching hospital”.

Luckily, once a year there’s CleanMed.  Billed as the premier environmental conference for healthcare sustainability (yes, there is more than one conference on healthcare sustainability), CleanMed brings together people from across North America and the world to talk about how healthcare is affecting the environment.   And how the environment is affecting health.  And how affected health requires more healthcare.  And how healthcare is affecting the environment.  And how the environment…

There are CEOs, CFOs and GPOs.  There are Nurses and sustainability professionals like me.  There are people looking to buy green products for healthcare, and people looking to sell green products to healthcare.  There are big hospital systems embedding environmental sustainability into their very being and there are small clinics just starting to put a recycling program together.  In short, there are hundreds gathered to share, laugh, cry, support, plan and just generally talk about greening healthcare.

Because sometimes you just want to say things like, “we’re working with our GPO to put some EPP in an RFP to get DEHP out of our IVs”…