Last month, UCSF Health St. Mary’s Hospital took a big step toward sustainability by hosting its first-ever e-waste diversion event, organized by sustainability lead Matt Richardson, DPT.
With the merger acquisition last year, departments received new monitors to ensure full functionality with the Epic Electronic Medical Record (EMR). This left many older working monitors as surplus. Faced with a growing stockpile of unused working computer monitors and limited storage space, Richardson decided to tackle the program head-on through a pop-up reuse event.
Recognizing that recycling isn’t always the most sustainable option, Richardson followed the waste hierarchy of refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and focused the e-waste event on increasing the reusability of the monitors. With collaboration and support from UCSF IT and St. Mary’s leadership, he organized a monitor reuse and giveaway program, aimed at redistributing functioning equipment to staff, rather than sending it out for recycling or disposal.
The event diverted over than 150 monitors from the landfill.
The event was held on Thursday, July 3, from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and allowed UCSF employees to adopt up to five monitors for personal or family use. Participation was based on the honor system and required a valid UCSF ID, employees’ names, department, and the number of monitors taken were logged to maintain transparency and ensure fair distribution.
The priority was redeployment for employee use, so 90 monitors were staged for Epic training at both St. Mary’s and Saint Francis Hospitals. After training stations were implemented, the remaining monitors were up for adoption. During the pop-up event, 154 monitors were adopted by St. Mary’s staff members, 40 were returned to the Sustainability team for future re-use, and approximately 86 were disposed of as e-waste.
If you are interested in hosting a similar pop-up event at Saint Francis, reach out to Matthew.Richardson2@ucsf.edu.
To stay in the loop for upcoming monitor adoption events, contact sustainability@ucsf.edu.