Providence’s Beth Schenk wants a healthcare system that meets the climate crisis

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Beth Schenk, chief environmental stewardship officer at Providence, a not-for-profit Catholic health system that employs nearly 120,000 workers across 51 hospitals. Schenk’s job is to guide the system toward a more sustainable future, reducing both the energy that Providence consumes and the waste it creates.

She’s got work cut out for her. In 2022, the White House reported that about 8.5% of annual US emissions come from the healthcare industry.

Schenk discussed what blips on Providence’s sustainability radar, such as food waste and air pollution, and how she hopes to help the healthcare system champion sustainability during the climate crisis.

This article has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What are the biggest environmental concerns for a healthcare system like Providence?

We know that pollution, in lots of different ways, does harm health. It undermines issues that people may have and can contribute to issues that people may not have yet.

Healthcare is fairly polluting. If you’ve been in a hospital, you may have thought that they created a lot of garbage. That’s very visible, so people can understand that. But also healthcare is very energy intensive. We use a lot of chemicals. We serve 5 million meals a year, and that means a lot of food waste, a lot of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, and a lot of transportation. We create a lot of pollution and waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

We are here for the purpose of caring for people, of supporting health. And so it’s both counterintuitive—and worse. We’re working against our goals if we’re also contributing to the harm of health.

How do you mitigate the waste and pollution that Providence creates?

Let’s take waste. In 2022, we created 94 million pounds of waste just in our hospitals. It’s astonishing, and not uncommon at all in healthcare. We’re diverting what we can through compost, which is really important. We’ve also been really focusing on recycling, and then probably the most challenging category: avoided waste. We’re trying to eliminate or reduce single-use, disposable plastics.

The inner energy and water that you use in healthcare is also very energy intensive. The HVAC system that turns the air through the hospitals to make sure it’s fresh and clean makes hospitals 2.5x more energy intensive than office buildings. We end up heating and cooling and then reheating the same space all in the same day. So we’re working with our utilities to purchase renewable energy certificates wherever we can. That then gives us a claim of solar and wind and other renewable sources.

What about cutting down the footprint in regard to other products—not just energy—that Providence imports to its facilities?

It’s enormously complex, a global supply chain that has so many parts and pieces. Because of that complexity, it’s difficult to have clarity about what the product is made of. What are the energy inputs? What are the packaging issues? What is the transportation?

We’ve taken on procurement as one of our really hard to solve areas. We work with our group purchasing organizations. We’ve worked with the National Academy of Medicine, who’s taken this on a little bit.

I think there’s more light being shined on the problem, but it doesn’t mean we have clarity and transparency yet. We can get a little bit more clarity about what is in the products, but that’s sometimes guarded as a proprietary secret. And so now, this is a real challenge.

Update 03/06/24: Beth Schenk’s title has been updated in the graphic and in the article since the story was originally posted.