Exclusive: during the first six months of pandemic health and social care’s carbon impact rose by 1%
The considerable use of personal protective equipment (PPE) in health and social care services in England during the first six months of the pandemic added an additional 1% to the carbon burden, a new analysis suggests.
Between February and August 2020, about 3 billion items of PPE were utilised – generating over 106,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. This equates to 591 tons a day, which works out to roughly 27,000 times the average individual’s daily carbon footprint, the authors estimated in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
