Financial and environmental costs of reusable and single-use anaesthetic equipment

An innovative approach to choosing hospital equipment is to consider the environmental costs in addition to other costs and benefits.

We used life cycle assessment to model the environmental and financial costs of different scenarios of replacing reusable anaesthetic equipment with single-use variants. The primary environmental costs were CO 2 emissions (in CO 2 equivalents) and water use (in litres). We compared energy source mixes between Australia, the UK/Europe, and the USA.

For an Australian hospital with six operating rooms, the annual financial cost of converting from single-use equipment to reusable anaesthetic equipment would be an AUD$32 033 (£19 220), 46% decrease. In Australia, converting from single-use to reusable equipment would result in an increase of CO 2 emissions from 5095 (95% CI: 4614-5658) to 5575 kg CO 2 eq (95% CI: 5542-5608), a 480 kg CO 2 eq (9%) increase. Using the UK/European power mix, converting from single-use (5575 kg CO 2 eq) to reusable anaesthetic equipment (802 kg CO 2 eq) would result in an 84% reduction (4873 kg CO 2 eq) in CO 2 emissions, whilst in the USA converting to reusables would have led to a 2427 kg CO 2 eq (48%) reduction. In Australia, converting from single-use to reusable equipment would more than double water use from 34.4 to 90.6 kilolitres.

For an Australian hospital with six operating rooms, converting from single-use to reusable anaesthetic equipment saved more than AUD$30 000 (£18 000) per annum, but increased the CO 2 emissions by almost 10%. The CO 2 offset is highly dependent on the power source mix, while water consumption is greater for reusable equipment.