CGH Environmental Strategies, Inc.

Our Mission

To increase the capacity of our clients to operate in a manner that provides a safe workplace, contains costs, and minimizes the environmental impact of operations on the community.

*****

Over the last decade we have received hundreds of inquiries and questions from health care facility managers, nurses and other professionals at hospitals throughout the country, as well as from practitioners in a number of other countries. The most frequently repeated questions are:

How do I get a waste reduction or a recycling program started?
How do I get administrative support for a program?
How do I cut my waste management and disposal costs?
What do I do now that we have shut down our incinerator?
How do we separate out and manage all these small amounts of hazardous wastes?

These questions emerge against the three "no's" repeated by almost every environmental services manager we have spoken to when confronted with having to address waste:

NO TIME, NO SPACE, NO MONEY

We have run dozens of workshops and training programs around the county reaching thousands of participants trying to answer those questions. This has been an interactive process in which we have learned at least as much as we have taught. There are now some amazing examples of waste minimization efforts in hospitals throughout the country which provide examples of how some of those questions are being answered and how the three "nos" are being addressed. Ultimately there will be as many different approaches as there are hospitals, each being uniquely suited to its environment.

The two guides we published with the American Society of Healthcare Environmental Services division of the American Hospital Association,

An Ounce of Prevention: Waste Reduction Strategies for Health care Facilities
Guidebook for Hospital Waste Reduction Planning and Program Implementation

and the training video produced by Fanlight productions, No Time To Waste, details many of those examples.

Our approach in working with our clients draws not just on our expertise, but on the wealth of knowledge and actual experience with programs and policies that have been implemented in health care facilities throughout the world. Our goal in serving you is to put that knowledge base at your service to design and implement the best programs to meet your goals.

The health care field is changing rapidly, with mergers, downsizing, and constant reorganization. The waste management field has also changed rapidly with its own set of mergers, limiting service options. In addition new federal and state regulations have limited conventional waste treatment options such as incineration, forcing most facilities to find new options for dealing responsibly with their wastes. Responding to these new developments will be a continuing challenge for everyone in the health care field. Managers responsible for waste in health care facilities will be seeing waste as either a greater burden or a developing opportunity for their organization. The opportunity will be to create waste management systems which can cut costs, increase worker safety, and come into compliance with existing and future regulations and standards. The challenge will be to do this within the guidelines and multiple regulations currently in place, and in an environment where waste management is still viewed as a relatively inconsequential part of the organizational structure (until a crisis hits).

Most hospital waste management systems are still existing in a system governed by deferred maintenance, with the chief management rule being, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." We hear weekly from managers who have been in or just inherited such systems that have finally broken. As we all know, fixing a system during a crisis hardly ever leads to long term solutions. If it is your intent to get beyond crisis management in waste and become proactive, then CGH is prepared to provide you with the resources, guidance and assurances that you will need to address this critical area.

CGH offers a comprehensive approach to integrated waste management. While it is useful to separate out different waste streams (e.g., regulated medical waste, solid waste, hazardous wastes, recyclable wastes), it is necessary to see all wastes as a whole in order to create the best long term approach and reap the greatest benefits from any actions you will take. The focus of this approach is to ensure regulatory compliance and worker safety, while decreasing costs. The method is to reduce waste volumes of the more hazardous wastes by source reduction and conscientious segregation. This will increase the volumes of the less hazardous types of waste (e.g., reduce RMW and increase solid waste). Worker safety will be less compromised, and the opportunities to further segregate wastes for recycling and composting will continue to reduce costs, and meet other secondary goals (e.g., a hospital environmental policy or positive public relations).