As organizations and institutions across the Boston area consider how to reduce their emissions, two of Boston’s major health systems announced new data around their sustainability efforts in reports released last month.

The emissions footprint of hospitals and health systems is a deep one. According to a 2022 report from The Commonwealth Fund, the healthcare sector accounted for 8.5% of greenhouse gas emissions.

In a report, released April 7, Boston Medical Center published early data from the first of a three-year partnership between the health system with Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which has an office in Cambridge. Through that partnership, the health system is aiming to identify and tackle high emissions through its operations related to its supply chain — the materials it purchases and the waste it generates. According to the report, BMC’s supply chain makes up 80% of the health system’s emissions.

That 80% of emissions are wide reaching, including emissions needed to produce the materials, to transport them to the hospital, to process and remove the waste and any emissions associated with the waste left behind.

For the report, BMC conducted waste audits across three sites in its main hospital campus in the South End: the hospital’s inpatient pharmacy, its largest outpatient pharmacy and the infusion center where patients receive intravenous medicines.

Audits revealed that some of the biggest emissions were related to regulated medical waste — things like used needles and objects saturated with internal bodily fluids. That type of waste has to go through a more extensive sterilization process before disposal. Much of the waste being disposed of in the regulated medical waste bins didn’t meet the higher threshold, the audits found, and were being unnecessarily treated.

Another hotspot identified by the report was the hospital’s plastic use, said Dr. Anna Goldman, BMC’s medical director of sustainability.

“We were not surprised to find that plastics are pretty much completely woven into the fabric of care delivery at this point. They’re highly durable, they’re flexible, they can be molded into anything you need,” said Goldman, who is also a primary care physician.

However, they’re also associated with greater emissions across their life cycle and are a major source of pollution.

All three locations in which BMC focused on auditing waste in its report were pharmacy-related, due to the partnership with Takeda, which Goldman said “100% leaves out most of the hospital.”

The report has still allowed BMC to build a foundation for future waste management improvements.

“You can’t really just improve waste profiles in a profound way in one area of the hospital without having the whole infrastructure to support it across the hospital,” Goldman said.

The work has spurred a campus-wide effort to reduce waste and improve how trash is disposed. Goldman said that the first year of the effort catalyzed better recycling practices and improved recycling contracts with municipal recyclers.

A consultant’s assessment also examined the whole of BMC’s main campus to assess where things like bins for regulated medical waste currently are being used ineffectively and can be removed, or where additional infrastructure can be added to ensure only the waste that needs to ends up in the specialized bins.

Separately, for Earth Day, Mass General Brigham released a report tracking its various green efforts across the system, from reducing emissions in the energy it uses to improving sustainability in its labs and increasing climate resilience in healthcare.

Dr. Jonathan Slutzman, MGB’s medical director for sustainability, touted gains the health system has had in improving its emissions, including in increasing the amount of energy it gets from renewable resources. According to the report, 80% of the health system’s electricity comes from renewable sources.

And he said that commitment is ongoing. At its new Phillip and Susan Ragon Building, an in-progress development at the downtown Mass General Hospital campus, the project is designed to minimize reliance on fossil fuels. When the cancer and cardiac care facility opens in 2027, it will have no gas lines and will run only on electricity. Only its emergency backup generator will rely on fossil fuels, said Slutzman, who also works as an emergency medicine specialist at Mass General Hospital.

The health system’s efforts have also brought clinicians and providers in on the effort, which Slutzman said has been important to increase buy-in and participation.

“Physicians and nurses and pharmacists really care a lot about taking good care of patients, and if somebody comes along and says, ‘Hey, we think it would be better if you did this a different way, because environmentally it’s better,’ they’re going to be pretty skeptical,” he said. “But having other clinicians who are focused on environmental sustainability, and can speak to them in clinical words and with clinical voices, it really helps to change minds.”

As hospitals pursue the work, staff leading the efforts say that central to their work around sustainability is the impact they hope it will have on patients. Both Goldman and Slutzman said their systems were aware of the conflict between hospitals trying to serve patients and those same hospitals serving as a major source of emissions that can affect health — especially of patients often at higher risk in environmental justice communities.

“Our job is to take good care of patients, protect the community, be stewards of human health and clearly pollution is harming our communities’ health in ways that we really shouldn’t be doing as much as possible,” Slutzman said.

Air pollution associated with fossil fuel emissions can increase asthma rates, heart attacks and respiratory diseases, according to the World Health Organization.

In BMC’s work around reducing emissions from its supply chain, Goldman said a reduction of fossil-fuel-based plastics should also mean fewer microplastics, which research has found extensively in human tissue. Research about the health impacts of those tiny fragments of plastic is ongoing, but could be linked to cancer, heart attacks and reproductive problems.

The health systems also are focused on sharing what they are doing to increase sustainability to other healthcare facilities in an effort to further reduce emissions.

At BMC, the waste audits — which, according to the report, may be the first comprehensive audits of waste from pharmacies or infusions centers at any U.S. health system — informed the creation of a guide to help other hospitals and pharmacies track their own supply chain emissions.

“That’s always the name of the game in sustainability, as you want to be if you’re doing something innovative, you want to help others do it too”.

The reception from other health systems has been positive, she said, as have conversations with recyclers and upstream suppliers to find ways to reduce emissions at other parts of the supply chain.

Mass General Brigham, too, has been focused on trying to share its work to help other health systems to do the same. Slutzman said he was getting ready to attend a health sustainability conference to learn what other hospitals have been pursuing and to share their own results.

“It’s great if Mass General Brigham cleans up its environmental footprint, but it would be even better if all hospitals did, and beyond that, all industries,” Slutzman said. “We’re not trying to be proprietary here, right? That doesn’t help our patients and our communities.”