Hi, We're looking into how green we can make our home dialysis installations as green as possible and whether we can attract grants, Government or Local Council, to progress this. Has anyone looked into this and have any suggestions and/or comments? Gerry
Gerry, depends what you mean by green? In my case cardboard and plastic waste is collected weekly for the local council. Boxes are sometimes listed on Freecycle so get second use. We're not as thourough as we might be for the 'small' wrapping waste. Waste 'water' going into the garden rather than down the drain maybe?
Hi All
Can any PD patients out there let me know how their clinical waste is uplifted? Do you dispose of it yourself through either plastic waste or landfill from your home, or is it uplifted as pure clinical by either the trust or the council? Thanks, Mary
Nottinghamshire:
PD waste goes into the domestic waste bins.
Patients have tried to take it to landfills but have been turned away.
Thanks
Tina
I emailled our home therapies manager and this is the answer I received
'Our patients have clinical waste uplifted mainly by third party collections for disposal (landfill I think)
We do advocate segregating clinical and non clinical (plastics, wrappers etc)
Cardboard boxes initially we encourage re-use (storage etc) but after that, patients generally take to local tips.
There was an initiative from a dialysis company years back to uplift the cardboard boxes as the new delivery was being made, but unfortunately, nothing came of this. The other 2 dialysis PD companies haven't taken up this initiative.'
Hope this helps
Ben
HI,
In Australia we have been working dilligently on raising the profile of enviromental dialysis. Our current home dialysis program, we are offering water recycling to all patients who do not have access to mains water supply (as you can appreciated parts of Australia are quite arid and water can be scarce), with the option to upgrade to a recycle system for those who do have mains water supply. In addition to this, we have also completed a pilot study looking at the viability of solar power to help offset costs associated with Home HD, as well as improving the overall carbon footprint of Home HD. Our Solar Assisted Dialysis project in our Home Training unit saw us generate approximately 80% of the total power required to run 4 haemodialysis machines and the portable reverse osmosis machine. We applied these figures to a home dialysis model approximated that for the cost of approximately $4500 AUD (2000 pounds) we could recycle the reject water from the RO unit, (for use in the haemodialysis process and or domestic uses) and collect enough energy from the solar panels to offset the power related costs of haemodialysis only. While we haven't put this into practice yet (Home Solar Power) its work in progress.
Here are some links to our articles.
Waste recycling.. we recycle all Dialysate bottles, saline bags and cardboard packaging. Our local recycling council picks up.... Council also supplies larger recycling waste bins :)
I hope this helps somewhat, any questiosn please ask :)
Kind Regards
Tony
Hi, What I'm looking at is making Home HD as green as possible including recycling packaging, grey water recovery, heat recovery (from drain), solar panels and grants for these, alternatives to the current chemicals we use for disinfecting inside AND outside machines, etc etc etc. So basically down to the nuts and bolts and fine tuning of recycling and energy recovery. AND what bodies can make grants available for any of this. Many thanks in anticipation, Gerry