BNF

I'd like to see a section in the BNF about carbon footprints of care. Please  help achieve this by pushing for it with any contacts you have. 

I know that it's not going to be feasible to give exact figures, but it seems a good place to start.

GSK have just had their Trelegy Elipta inhaler certified as carbon neutral by the Carbon Trust. While I suspect there is a degree of greenwashing going on here, they are making an effort and there is a method being used. One issue is to get a standard calculation method adopted across the industry. If you read How Bad are Bananas by Mike Berners-Lee then you'll see that while his job is calculating carbon footprints he's sceptical about their accuracy but it is feasible to calculate likely ranges for the answer. I personally don't think we're going to get better messages than "tablets and capsules approx 1g CO2e each, so a 5 day course of Doxycycline has approximately a third of the cost of a 5 day course of amoxicillin", "the major cost is in the tablet/blister strip/box/transport"; "DPI good, pMDI bad". Nonetheless it's going to be important to consider some of these effects and questions and a big area that will need dealing with is going to be 'when to stop medication' because poly-pharmacy certainly contributes to the carbon footprint of care.