Carbon footprint of hospital laundry: a life-cycle assessment.

Objectives: To assess greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a regional hospital laundry unit, and model ways in which these can be reduced.
Design: A cradle to grave process-based attributional life-cycle assessment.
Setting: A large hospital laundry unit supplying hospitals in Southwest England.
Population: All laundry processed through the unit in 2020-21 and 2021-22 financial years.
Primary Outcome Measure: The mean carbon footprint of processing one laundry item, expressed as in terms of the global warming potential over 100 years, as carbon dioxide equivalents (CO ₂ e).
Results: Average annual laundry unit GHG emissions were 2947 t CO ₂ e. Average GHG emissions were 0.225 kg CO ₂ e per item-use and 0.5080 kg CO ₂ e/kg of laundry. Natural gas use contributed 75.7% of on-site GHG emissions. Boiler electrification using national grid electricity for 2020-2022 would have increased GHG emissions by 9.1%, however by 2030 this would reduce annual emissions by 31.9% based on the national grid decarbonisation trend. Per-item transport-related GHG emissions reduce substantially when heavy goods vehicles are filled at ≥50% payload capacity. Single-use laundry item alternatives cause significantly higher per-use GHG emissions, even if reusable laundry were transported long distances and incinerated at the end of its lifetime.
Conclusions: The laundry unit has a large carbon footprint, however the per-item GHG emissions are modest and significantly lower than using single-use alternatives. Future electrification of boilers and optimal delivery vehicle loading can reduce the GHG emissions per laundry item.
Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared.
(© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)