Sustainability.

Sustainability goes beyond being ‘eco conscious’, recycling and reducing waste. It goes deeper than that… Using local products, local suppliers, understanding where products are made and the sustainability (and fair pay) within the supply chain.

We believe that reducing the amount of waste created is essential to any business. The health care industry can be very wasteful. The need for disposable single use items such as gloves, masks, pads, etc, coupled with the need for sterile single use items such as swabs and needles. Unfortunately many of these cannot be avoided, but we can reduce our impact wherever possible. This is how we do it at Agile:

• Paperless – Being ‘Paperless’ is nothing new, and in our opinion it should be a standard for most businesses by now.

• Buying in bulk – Where possible we buy in bulk. This reduces the use of packaging, meaning less waste, it also reduces delivery miles.

• Packaging – We choose product options that have recycleable packaging above those with plastic wrap.

• Reusable cups – Our water cooler has glass cups, and we don’t supply single use cups, plates or cutlery in the clinic. Our water cooler is also linked to the mains so we don’t need plastic bottles.

• Reusable towels – All of our rooms, including the washroom have cotton hand towels rather than disposable paper towels.

• Recycling – With our best efforts being made to reduce waste, we still produce some. All recycleable waste is separated and reclcyled, these include: Metal/Tin, Food/compost, Cardboard, paper, glass, mixed plastics and soft plastic.

Being ‘Paperless’ is nothing new, and in our opinion it should be a standard for most businesses by now. From the initial concept we agreed that Agile should be paperless in order to reduce an unnecessary impact on the environment. To the dissopointment of some clients one major step in this process was to ensure that no printer was purchased or installed into the clinic, not only does this cut our paper waste, but also waste from ink cartridges and the environmental impact of the ink and printer itself.

Our card machine is set to only print paper receipts when a customer requests one (did you know that most card machine receipts cannot be recycled).

With the increased use of cleaning products around the world, and the increased frequency of cleaning, coupled with the harmful chemicals that many cleaning supplies contain, we are aware of the huge impact that these items can have. Firstly to avoid packaging waste we will use refillable bottles and purchase bulk size, powder or concentrates, preferably with a cardboard/cardboard component to the packaging.

Secondly all cleaning supplies (with the exception of drain cleaner and sanitizing spray) will be eco friendly products, and where possible be made locally to reduce the carbon footprint in the supply chain of the product. Many of our product such as our soap, hand lotion, floor cleaner and dish soap are purchased locally from Ash Refillery & Co.

In the quest to avoid paper, we have however increased our requirement to do laundry.

Where we can, we use smaller towels across the clinic. We provide 3 towel size options to practitioners in order to cut down on the amount large/bulky laundry being done.

Over the past year we have been trialing various laundry products, and despite the economic cost we have invested in using eco laundry detergent sheets. These eliminate the use of plastic packaging, are free of many harmful chemicals, and reduce the transportation footprint by ensuring that unnecessary water is not being transported.

We believe that the increased cost is heavily outweighed by the eco advantages of this product.

We believe that part of being sustainable is to also be honest. We are far from perfect with our sustainability practices, but we are trying. These are the areas which we are working to improve.

Kitchen paper towels – These still provide a convenient and easy to use product. We only use paper towel products made with 100% recycled materials. When we throw these away they are put into the compost, be we are looking at ways to eliminate their use, or to find a more environmentally friendly option.

Single use medical products - This is a tough area to improve, and health restrictions often prevent us making changes. We have recently provided wooden shaft swabs as an alternative to plastic swabs, and we are alway looking for further ways to improve further.

Business cards and paper marketing – These form an important part of our marketing, and unfortunately they are not something which we can eliminate. At the moment any paper products that we use are at least 10% recycled material, and any new material used is FSC-Certified, they are also fully recyclable.