Good evening and welcome to tonight's webinar. I'm pleased to join you this evening to chair this session. My name's Rich Daley and I am the head of sales for the webinar vet.

We're bringing you a slightly different webinar this evening, which is always good, keeps the interest going, and this one is part of an area that is of particular interest and quite a hot topic at the moment. I'm delighted that we're joined by Ellie West of Davies Veterinary Specialists. Tonight, Ellie will be talking about the journey they've taken culminating in the awarding of a silver level accreditation with investors in the environment.

I'm sure there's many of you out there who'd like to do more to support the environment and er er want to look at how your practise can contribute to. Being more carbon neutral, but sometimes it can be daunting knowing where to start. So hopefully it'll be a bit of a whistle stop tour.

I know that, Ellie could probably do 4 or 5 hours on this. This will just be 45 minutes to an hour in length, but hopefully it'll give you a good overview of the starting point and, to help, start the discussion and give you some ideas going forward. So, who is Ellie West?

Ellie graduated from the Cambridge University in 2003. And worked first as an intern in a private referral practise and then as a general practitioner in a first opinion clinic. She's been an anaesthetist in 2006, 1st as an intern at University College Dublin, and then as a clinician teacher at the University of Liverpool, and now as an anaesthetist at Davies's since 2013.

Ellie's particular interest in sustainability within veterinary medicine and management of chronic pain. Ellie is the green champion for investors in the environment at Davies's Veterinary Specialists. So, without further ado, I'd like to hand you over to Ellie.

Thank you, Rich, and welcome to everybody joining us both this evening. We're going to be following the journey which we have taken at Davies's Veterinary Specialists to try and become more environmentally sustainable, which you may have heard something of following our press release in autumn of 2018. It has been a fascinating and quite challenging process, and we have learned a lot and we're really keen to share as much of this as possible to have the biggest impact, but also to learn as much as we can from other people.

Throughout this webinar, I'll try to identify the challenges which we have found in implementing sustainability initiatives within our business. And along the way, I hope to convince you, that we do have an impact on our environment, and there are ways which you can, we can reduce our impact. But there's also big benefits of these solutions to your practise.

I want to start by explaining why and how environmental sustainability has become a thing at Davies veterinary Specialists. So firstly, what is sustainability? Well, the Bruntland Commission was a UN initiative in 1987 which defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

And these sustainability initiatives should provide planets should provide benefit to the planet, the people on the planet, and also the profit line, or the economic growth of a, of an area or of an institution. Now a company may choose to engage with sustainability for a number of reasons. You might choose to do it because you want economic efficiencies, which environmental initiatives often do.

And in our first year, when we mostly were setting up our audit scheme, we estimated easy win savings around about 4600 per annum, with several 1000 a year potential in ongoing savings. You might wish to appeal to a certain sector of the market and be seen as a green business, and certainly some businesses do have this deep sustainability ethos. Or you might just want to reduce your risk of being seen as an unethical or ungreen company.

But I think perhaps the best reason to incorporate sustainability is because it's just the right thing to do. And this is often the major driving force for sustainability in business. There is starting to be data suggesting that the healthcare system, the medical healthcare system, is directly contributing to the problem that we're suffering with the climate, and that's having a direct impact on healthcare of people on the planet.

And it seems likely that the veterinary sector could be contributing as well. Davies is a private multidisciplinary small animal referral centre based near Bedford, founded 20 years ago by Gerry and Olivia Davies. We now have around about 180 staff, including specialist clinicians, interns, vet nurses, canal assistants, physiotherapists, client care, administration and maintenance staff.

So we've got a lot of people on site and we see over 9000 patients a year. There are likely to be elements of our story which are particular to our setting, but what I'm hoping to give you, is, demonstrate where common problems and common solutions exist, but also where you need to be a little bit innovative in your own practise. Our Green Group story started at Davies with one of our anaesthetists, Sarah, and she went to a talk by Hugh Montgomery, about the impacts of climate change.

And this is a really good resource. It's a 20 minute video which is available free via the link provided to the Royal College of anaesthetists Aries talk. And after attending this talk, Sarah came back to Davies's and she insisted that we do something.

And in response to this, our directors agreed to convene and support a green group in the practise to look at our carbon footprint and engage better practise by all. And initially there were about 6 people involved, all with variable time constraints and variable interests and from different areas in the practise. And we all got together and we elected Patricia as our chair.

And then there were a number of us, including myself, that were then involved in the Green Group and officially on the Green Group. And we started to recognise straight away we had some challenges. The first challenge we had was that there, we felt like we had a lack of knowledge of, of what to do.

And there are very few veterinary resources we found for guiding sustainability changes. And so we sought information from the medical sector. Now the biggest resource that we came across was the sustainable development unit of the NHS and that was set up to help NHS trusts achieve carbon reductions of 80% by 2050.

And it has a lot of online spreadsheets and a lot of online tools and update regular news updates. And there was a book written by the head of the STU called Sustainable Healthcare. And so I got that book and I read through it and it's got a lot of it about the impacts of healthcare on the planet and a lot of potential solutions.

There are a couple of UK and global organisations set up to help hospitals and big institutions, but these are not currently available to, for vets to join. We got in touch with the sustainability manager of one of our local NHS hospitals, and that was through investors in the environment. So Northampton General Hospital has a really proactive and enthusiastic sustainability manager.

And so we started getting information from, from all these different people. We found that we had a lack of cultural authority within the practise. We were overridden by other groups, for instance, the infection control group and the Finance Committee.

We found that we have limited power within the practise and also limited understanding of how to change things and implement new strategies that would be practise wide. And one of our really important steps early on was to get a director involved who was a direct liaison to the group who would support and inform and help us move forward with our initiatives. And, and that made a big difference for us moving forward.

We found that we weren't that good at communicating to start with. We found that changes that we made, we weren't communicating well to the rest of the team. And so engagement with what we were trying to achieve was pretty poor.

We weren't telling people why things were important and what the impacts we were having, and we weren't, communicating all of the changes that we wanted to make so that everybody did them. And we also found a time problem because it takes time to do these things and if you're a sustainability manager in the NHS that's, that's a full-time role. So at this point, I started looking for external support, and an accreditation scheme seemed like a sensible way to justify the cost, the cost of getting such external support in terms of the marketing and the expertise provided.

And the sustainable development unit of the NHS produced this table, which compared some of the common accreditation schemes available in the UK. And you can see investors in the environment scored very highly, and it was described as the most rewarding, although no not perhaps the most demanding or rigorous of the schemes available. An external environmental management scheme is also sometimes called a sustainable development management plan, SDMP.

It will offer you support as well as accountability and thus motivation, and it's easier for your clients and your stakeholders to understand that you're just making a list of your internal achievements. So it supports the reputation of your company. And for us, it also made assessing our impacts more manageable and helped us to get better quality data.

So we were reducing the wasted time. So what did we do? We identified a person responsible for the scheme, and that's me, so I'm the champion, the green champion for investors in the environment.

We chose 3 to 5 key resources to audit every 3 months, and we, and that's a quantitative audit of those resources and we submit that data to investors in the environment. We set ourselves achievable target reductions and with deadlines and specific people responsible for those for those areas. And we also produced and updated written policies.

Our environmental policy is now available on that on our website, so that's available for all to see and that holds us to account. But we've also got internal travel plans, corporate social responsibility, recycling, staff engagement, sustainable procurement and evidence of legal compliance with environmental regulations. I went to a networking meeting run by investors in the environment and another more experienced sustainability manager gave me advice to audit all the projects that you run.

So another document which I keep is an ongoing action plan of where we're up to with all of our changes and all of our all of our initiatives. The resources that we chose to quantitatively monitor are the ones that we've listed there, and we try to agree smart targets, specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic and time-based. And we submit that audit data, as I said, every, every 3 months to investors in the environment.

And that's mostly scope one data, which would be your direct emissions from fuels burned at source. Your scope to data emissions from the consumption of your purchase sources like energy sources like electricity. And not including all of our scope 3 data.

So that would be emissions from things like commuting, things that controlled, that are not controlled by your organisation but are directly linked to your activity, things like procurement of your pharmaceuticals. So we don't measure all of our scope 3 data. If you're interested in doing this for yourself, there's a really useful web link there for conversion factors to convert kilowatt out to carbon emissions.

Now I want to just touch on a little bit of carbon literacy, because there's many ways to measure your environmental impact. The world, the WWF reported that we have wiped out 60% of our animal species since 1970. We've got measurable levels of air pollution.

We've got measurable levels of insect population crashes. So you can measure your environmental impacts in many different ways. But carbon emissions has the advantage of being very biologically significant as a major cause of climate change and also probably the most easily quantifiable environmental impact.

So I've put there some, carbon emissions measured in CO2 equivalents to just give you an idea of what kind of carbon emissions we produce per year each, and it's around about 6.5 tonnes, but also what that is equivalent with. And the thing I like best there is you can plant 65 trees.

To give you an idea of the timeline for all of this, we started the Green Group in January 2017, and we had these small projects running and we started collecting data, but we were collecting lots of different things. We weren't really getting anywhere. So it took us till January 2018 to put together the plan to join investors in the environment, and then we then over the next eight months, created our environmental management scheme or folder for audit by them.

We were awarded our silver award. But it doesn't stop there. And this is the benefit of having such a plan is that you have an ongoing action plan now.

We have regular audits and I have regular phone calls with our liaison there, and we produce biannual board reports and we get re accreditation every year. So this is now hopefully something which is part of what we do at Davey's specialists. So next, what are our environmental impacts and what can we do to reduce them?

So I've made a list here of all the impacts that I think we have at Davies's and it's not, not everything, but probably the major ones. And this is taken from what we've come across elsewhere. And hopefully I'm going to touch on all of these and give you some high impact, fairly easy ways of, of trying to reduce these impacts.

And I'm gonna start with domestic waste. And this is a hot topic, which has made headline news due to the wonderful Blue Planet series, which highlighted the impact of plastics in the oceans. But also we've had more recent headlines from the reduction in export options for UK waste.

We can expect around about 3 to 6 kg of waste daily per medical hospital bed, and we reckon at Davies we produce something in the order of 7 kg of waste per patient across the whole stay. And we split that here into about 15 different waste streams. For your information, we're in the process of writing an article for in practise on sustainable waste management and hopefully that'll be out in the next couple of months to give you further guidance on, on these areas.

Now, it's this sort of horrifying, defiling of our environment which fuels us to take action. But for the majority of our waste from healthcare facilities in developed countries, it should end up in landfill or being incinerated. And in fact, waste probably contributes relatively little to the healthcare carbon footprint due to more modern waste processing.

We calculate it around about 2% of our carbon footprint at Dabies, and it's probably far less for the NHS. But filling of landfills and contamination by microplastics and chemicals is still a big problem. So whilst it only contributes to 0.1% of the NHS's total budget, it's a, a, a major talking point and a major area of interest within the NHS.

I want to talk about domestic waste in particular, since the majority of waste we produce in a healthcare setting is similar to domestic or black bag waste. Indeed, audits of medical waste from anaesthetic rooms suggest that 40 to 60% can be recycled. Therefore, we can apply much of what we know from the domestic setting to our workplaces.

And I want to introduce the waste hierarchy, and this is a statutory legal tool within the 2012 waste regulations in the UK, and they oblige every individual to correctly segregate and dispose of waste. But in addition to this, to also optimise disposal where it's available according to the least environmentally harmful option. And you can see according to the stages of the waste hierarchy, disposal is really the, the least favourable option.

And we should be trying to move everything, every type of waste up the waste hierarchy, and not just the waste, but the residues of the waste as well. So we'll start with what we can do with our domestic waste, . And I've put here black bag waste but also clear bag waste, which will be, is representing dry mix recycling waste.

General waste can go to landfill. But there's limited space in landfill sites and high carbon and methane emissions are possible if modern capture technologies for methane are not used. Although for plastics, there's an exception, carbon emissions are are much lower than organic matter.

Energy for waste facilities are becoming more popular option due to the lower carbon emissions and the lower residues produced in landfill. But they're pretty controversial due to the potential for emissions released, although these emissions are controlled by the Environment Agency. The next option is recycling, and recycling generates the lowest emissions compared with other disposal methods for paper and plastics.

And in the case of PVC, which accounts for 40% of the medical plastic devices, recycling reduces the energy requirements by 90% compared with producing new PVC. So you can segregate your general waste to create a dry mixed recycling scheme stream, and that reduces the amount that goes to landfill. Although this does require avoiding contamination by food waste and examination gloves and actually finding a DMR facility to take your waste.

You can also separate high value items like cardboard on site, and this is something we're in the process of doing to reduce the cost of disposal of, of our packaging cardboard. You can look for recycling logos. There's more information at the WRAP, the rap website and recycleNow.com as to what is recyclable.

And it's important to try and optimise the quality of what you're sending into the recycling streams so that the recycling industry is a, is a valuable industry. We've just started using the Terra Cycle recycling programme for all of our plastic pet food packaging. And this seems like a really positive step forward in linking manufacturers of packaging with the end users of packaging.

You can look for products which use recycled materials, and you can look for those which are low carbon and recyclable. And a lot of the companies, the supply companies are now offering these options and it's kind of up to us to demand them and to, and to buy them, to show support for the industry. Uting waste is always the best option.

So we just gave all our staff reusable water bottles as a Christmas gift, and reusable water bottles become carbon neutral within about 20 uses. So that's a really good way of reducing the number of plastic cups that you're using on site. You can also look for interesting ideas and get in touch with other people.

There's a zero waste veterinary Facebook site, and they've got some great ideas on and people talking about what they've managed to get hold of to reduce the waste. And you could make a learning without landfill pledge. And this group was set up by a couple of vet nurses to reduce the waste produced at conferences.

But again, they've got some great initiatives and great ideas on waste reduction in general. I mentioned food waste because avoiding 1 kilogramme of food waste saves over 4 kilogrammes of carbon emissions compared with landfill. Food waste should also be removed from general waste streams as they can contaminate materials which could be recycled otherwise, and because food waste is difficult to incinerate because of the high water content.

And there are, are fortunately, better options. So you can send your food waste to landfill. We we want to try and avoid that.

Or we can go for moving up the food at the waste hierarchy. And for food, the waste hierarchy deviates a little from the usual. While composting produces lower carbon emissions, anaerobic digestion produces a combination of digestate, which can be used as a fertiliser, and biogas, which can be used to replace traditional fossil fuel gas.

And for these reasons, anaerobic digestion should be used above composting, and they're also more efficient large scale facilities which will take your food waste off site and and take them into an anaerobic digestion facility. As for domestic waste, healthcare waste doesn't account for a large amount of the budget or carbon footprint for the NHS, but this waste stream contains some potentially hazardous drugs, chemicals, infections, and therefore may be disproportionately harmful. Every type of healthcare waste has a European waistcoat, and Brexit notwithstanding, the system seems to remain, it's probably gonna remain likely similar for the same for the time being.

So if it has a a separate EWC code, it should be put in a separate container and go down a separate route as far as waste is concerned. The most hazardous of our waste streams must be incinerated legally, and they cost around about 10 times more than domestic waste to dispose of, and they carry an additional hazardous consignment fee of around about 20 pounds imposed by the Environment Agency for every collection of any amount of hazardous waste. So it's really important to correctly identify these waste types to protect the environment, to protect ourselves, but also to, to save money for your business.

And if you're in any doubt as to what should go where, there is assistance in the wonderful HTM 0701, all 187 pages of it. And it goes into quite some specifics about what, what you should do with your different waste streams. But these waste streams, classed as hazardous, they legally have to be incinerated and you've got your cytotoxic waste there, your infectious pharmaceutical waste and and your pharmaceutical and radioactive waste.

Now incineration releases potentially harmful air contaminants and plastics release dioxins and you get particularly high levels of dioxins from PVC plastics. Although modern facilities have complex filtering processes which should reduce environmental contamination. So the best option that we have here to move up the waste hierarchy is to prevent the waste production in the first place, and this is indeed possible.

So the first thing we did was we switched to cardboard pharmaceutical bins, the bio bins there, which avoids production, purchase and incineration of plastic containers, and that saved us around about $1200 a year, straight off. How we're now in the process of switching to reusable pharmaceutical and sharp spins, which reduce the carbon emissions of the process by 90% because you're not burning any container compared with the plastic containers, and those are widely used in the NHS and we'll be working with that company to collect information on the costs and carbon savings. You can try and avoid PVC and DEHP containing plastics and more of the drip bags that we're using and the giving sets that we're using now are available as PVC and DEHP free.

And we can also try to source materials, and these are examples of lower plastic content syringes that have lower resource consumption in their manufacture. And the BD emerald syringes I have there are also produced in a factory using renewable energy. So we can support the industries that are trying to help these issues.

For infectious or orange bag waste, you can incinerate it. That's, that's legally allowed, but there are lower carbon options. It's possible to heat sterilise it and then send the flock to landfill.

Or you can send it for energy for recovery. Unfortunately, there are limited energy for recovery facilities which are permitted to accept infectious waste and that might reduce your options. But I think those are becoming more available and more popular in the future.

So it's worth having a conversation with your waste contractor to see what you're doing at the moment, what is possible, and to let them know what you're trying to achieve in terms of sustainability. Now offensive waste is not intrinsically hazardous, it's just unpleasant. So the requirements for offensive waste are less stringent again.

You can send it to landfill at a minimum. You can send it for energy for recovery if you can find a plant that's permitted to take offensive waste. And there are becoming some medical recycling schemes.

The one is the most widely publicised that will accept certain numbers of medical PVC devices. But these recycling schemes are dependent on permits issued by the Environment Agency because the waste is contaminated by material, even if it's only blood or saliva or offensive materials. So this scheme is not currently available to veterinary contaminated waste.

A last word on offensive waste is really important to prevent infectious waste from landing up in the offensive waste stream. So having good education and good resources available for your staff on waste segregation should help you with, with that. There's often a conflict between infection control and sustainability, and I think we need more robust data on this topic.

The fallback has often been disposed of it if you're in any doubt, and medical groups often encourage the use of single-use equipment to prevent infection spread. However, it may not always be necessary, and we need to start asking questions and basing what we do on data rather rather than historic assumptions. So for instance, if you use rewashable surgical hats, so textile surgical hats, they can shed less microfiber and therefore reduce the infection risk compared with some types of disposable hats.

And I put up a study here that looked at 3 different ways of cleaning a dental chair, where you would expect quite a high aerosolized bacterial load, and they either use a plastic disposable barrier, a bog standard detergent, or a kind of bleach. And they found that all three protocols reduced the MRSA load to less to less than 1%. So we need to start looking and saying, well, do we really need that single use plastic that we think that we, we do need?

And, and, and can we Can we look for other ways of achieving the same thing? Now I want to talk about the potential effects of drugs. And there's a number of reasons that drugs can have an impact.

There's new measures of processed mass intensity, so how much a process requires in terms of mass to get the end product. And we are starting to realise that it can take over 40 kg of raw materials to make 1 kg of active drug. And there was a nice study of morphine, intravenous morphine production, which found that the highest carbon emission part of the pathway was for the packaging and the sterilisation.

So it makes me think, well, maybe using non-sterilized drugs and maybe asking for packaging in a different way is going to be a way to reduce the impact of our drug procurement. And there are starting to be, they're starting to be frameworks available from people like the STU to assess the carbon impact of drugs so that you can actually find out how much it costs you in terms of carbon intensity to obtain drugs and use them. But also carbon cost to benefit ratios through the National Institute of Health Research.

And the idea is that when you're trialling a new drug, you don't just find out what the benefit is in terms of prevention of healthcare problems, but you find out how much that costs you in terms of carbon efficiency. That so that becomes a research outcome on which they have to justify the research and justify the development of drugs. We know about 10 to 20% of pharmaceuticals remain after water is treated through our sewerage plants, and drugs can get into the environment by improper disposal, but also by excretion of active metabolites.

So the greatest risk to us in the environment is likely to be from agents with active metabolites with low bioavailability, so high dose is used, and high intrinsic toxicity. And this is probably the hormones, the antibiotics, the cytotoxic agents, the sedatives, and the anti-inflammatory drugs of the types of drugs that we use. There was a really interesting survey, I suppose, done by the charity Bug Life, the insect charity, and they sampled a load of rivers across the UK and they found around about 90% of the rivers that they sampled were contaminated with the insecticides near niotinoids, and half of the sites exceeded chronic pollution levels.

Now there are 68 registered veterinary products using near nicoinoids to treat small animals. . And we don't really know what impact that the treatment that we're prescribing has on our environment.

All drugs have to have an environmental assessment as part of their licencing by the VMD. But the BMD is actually proactively asking for research and that recently in the vet record, they're asking for people to put research proposals in to find out what the quantitative and qualitative impact of the insecticides that we're using are on, on our environment. Now, I am an anaesthetist, therefore, I, I wish to talk to you about anaesthetic agents, but I'm hoping that I will convince you that this is not a gratuitous, insertion of anaesthetic agents that, that it's genuinely something that we need to talk about.

And the reason is all modern inhalational anaesthetic agents act as greenhouse gases, and isofluorine and superfluorine are in that group. And some agents, mainly nitrous oxide, are also ozone depleting, and ozone molecules limit the transmission of harmful UV light towards the Earth's surface. And to give you a tangible grip on what sort of carbon emissions we're going to get from one bottle of isofluorine, er, you'll get around about the same carbon emissions as if you get in your car and you drive from John O'Groats to Plymouth.

Now the annual global impact of anaesthetic gases is estimated to be equivalent to one coal powered fire station or 1 million passenger cars, which might not seem like that much. And indeed within the NHS acute care facilities, the anaesthetic gases only account for 5% of the carbon footprint. And at DVS we calculate their impact around about 15%.

So they, they're not, a massive part of it. Within certain areas of your workload, they're probably more significant. So for instance, a surgical unit assess the carbon footprint of hysterectomies and of the total surgical and anaesthetic carbon footprint, the anaesthetic gases are accounted for 70%.

So if you're working mainly in an area where you're performing surgeries and doing anaesthesia, then actually the greenhouse gases from that area are majority going to be coming from your anaesthetic agents. But here is the bigger problem. Although we've just described that anaesthetic gases present a relatively low contribution to global carbon emissions.

We do need to control them as they're disproportionately effective as greenhouse gases. They unfortunately absorb infrared radiation within a window that the Earth uses to cool itself. And there's minor absorption by any naturally occurring greenhouse gas in that range.

So anaesthetic agents are thought to be responsible for between 10 to 15% of total anthropogenic human origin and radiative forcing of climate change since before the industrial era. And I think that this is going to become more known, and there's going to be more controls on the anaesthetic agents in the future in the same ways that there were global controls on the CFCs with the Montreal Protocol. So I think that that's something that we can be proactive about.

Is one anaesthetic agent a worse greenhouse gas than another? And the answer is yes. This is a medical study where they estimated the carbon emissions, which are on the X axis, of comparable anaesthetic protocols for an average 70 kg adult patient for 1 hour with a 60/40 admixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen.

And you can see that nitrous oxide contributes by far the largest proportion of the emissions for the isofluorine and the Siva fluorine protocol. Siva fluorine, protocol has a larger carbon emission because in medical anaesthesia, they use higher fresh gas flow rates with, with their anaesthetics. .

And actually in the paper, in the original paper, they don't show this in this diagram. If you're just using isofluorine and see fluorine with air and oxygen, in fact, isofluorine has the bigger carbon emissions than see fluorine. So if you're looking for the worst nitrous oxide and then isofluorine.

And I haven't included this flu in here because we don't use it much in veterinary anaesthesia, but that's really bad. It's worth noting, however, you can see propofol down the bottom there, and you can't actually see any carbon emissions for propofol because it's they're they're so much smaller than the carbon emissions for isofluorine and sfluorine with nitrous oxide. So propofol and by inference, total intravenous anaesthesia has far, far lower carbon emissions, and this is including the production, the delivery, the manufacture, as well as the actual greenhouse gas effect of the gases themselves.

And most of the costs, the carbon costs of propofol relate to the electricity that you need to deliver it in a syringe driver. I'm not suggesting at this stage that everybody should immediately switch to Teva, because I think there's important clinical and safety implications which need careful consideration in veterinary anaesthesia. But I think it's worth being aware that that has a far lower carbon impact.

So what can we do as far as sustainable pharmaceuticals goes? Well, we can use less volatile anaesthetic agent, and following the recent isoflurane shortages, there's plentiful advice for lower flow anaesthesia on the BVA, BSAVA and AVA websites. There are commercial technologies available, which are for recapture and reuse of the volatile anaesthetic agents, and these are being trialled in NHS hospitals in the UK as we speak.

And it seems likely to me because of the concerns with anaesthetic agents, that those will become widespread in the future. And they can take a simple a form as a charcoal type canister attached to your gas scavenging. So where you would have a charcoal canister at the moment, you have this canister which you send off to the company, they distil the anaesthetic agent and send it back to you in a bottle.

There are more complex systems available, but, but that technology is, is out there and I think that we'll have access to that in the near future. I think there's a strong argument for not using nitrous oxide in veterinary medicine, and that's an argument which I hope to be, bringing to discussion forums within the veterinary anaesthesia community. We can try and prevent pharmaceutical wastage, and there's a big emphasis in the NHS on careful prescribing.

So only prescribing short trials, followed by longer therapeutic doses if you need. But also within anaesthesia, there's a large proportion of the propofol that we draw up that is thrown away. So even within what we're doing day to day, there are probably areas where we can reduce our wastage.

And it's imperative that we dispose of our medicines appropriately. And again, that comes down to a lot of staff training and teaching people why we need to care about this. For your further information, we have just written a summary article which was recently accepted in veterinary anaesthesia and analgesia on environmental sustainability and anaesthesia.

And that's just been accepted, so that should be published in the next month or so. So on to procurement. And why procurement.

If we look at the NHS's print, which is a total around about 27.1 million tonnes, that represents around about 6 coal-fired power stations. Procurement contributes around about 60% of the carbon emissions and procurement of pharmaceuticals, in particular, is a big part of that.

We don't include procurement of pharmaceuticals into our carbon footprint at Davey's as yet. I, I haven't worked out how to, how to do that yet. But it's something that I think we should at least think about when we're making an environmental management plan or a sustainability policy is, is how to get hold of things in a sustainable way.

So what can we do? We can look for suppliers, and companies to work with that have accreditations or at the least that have environmental and sustainability policies. We are members of investors in the environment.

They're a really accessible scheme and they're open to not just healthcare institutions, but all sorts of businesses. The EMAS and ISO 14001 schemes are much bigger global schemes, and they're more suitable for big companies. They're very arduous to put together.

But all big companies should have a sustainability policy that's even on their, that's available on their website for public viewing. And they certainly should be able to back that up with data if you, if you ask for it. And I think in the future, we should expect that from every company, including our businesses.

You need to choose longer lasting and reusable equipment as well as equipment that's more efficient to start with. And it might be more expensive upfront costs, but because you're not having to pay for the maintenance and it should last you longer, you should, it should be an efficient thing to do. So you can look for equipment with the energy efficiency ratings that are A or A star and above.

You can ask your suppliers for sustainable solutions, and you can ask for local, or ethical sourcing. And we, we, we have bread delivered here every day, and I, I contacted in the very early stages of Green Group, I contacted our bakery and said, can we have our bread in, in paper bags rather than plastic bags. And it took them some effort because no one makes the paper bags anymore because everybody's so used to buying the plastic bags.

So they were, they were a bit shocked that we were asking for this, but now we get something like 3 loaves delivered a day in paper bags and it's, it's still pleasing. You can look for accreditation schemes like Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade, and for Seafood, the MSC logo, which gives you an idea of the of the that these things are more sustainable. You can try and pick more environmentally friendly chemicals, and there are there are websites that which, which have that sort of information.

And you can try and pick local and healthier and more sustainable foods for your staff. The other thing to Bear in mind with procurement is to try and have a minimal stocking system so that things aren't going out of date and you're using things in the right order. And it's getting away from the siege mentality, which we all got into with isofluorine, towards a ordering only what is required mentality.

And that can be just a shift in philosophy. Moving on to energy, which is a pretty universal area for sustainability. But it's particularly relevant in in our institutions, and we know for the NHS heating buildings and water contributes 20% of their total carbon footprint.

And actually at Davies's, we calculated it closer to 80% of our measured carbon footprint. And that's most likely because of our rural location, and we have no mains gas supply, but also that we don't measure the procurement carbon emissions, which makes the energy look like a proportionately higher percentage. Now, the actual energy that you use comes from a mix of that which is available to the UK grid.

But when you purchase renewable energy, that total amount of energy is being produced by renewables, and that supports the industry. So you're trying to create the demand for it, and you can see that at the moment, the majority of our energy is coming from fossil fuels, but a big proportion of it is coming from renewables and nuclear, and, and so it's supporting that area of the industry. For gas, we're not able to supply everything that we need in this country through the production of biogas at the moment, and most companies, renewable energy companies will only offer you up to 15% or so of your gas from biogas.

And some companies are carbon offsetting rather than trying to even source biogas. So I think in the short term, we should be trying to move away from the use of gas as an energy source and move move towards electricity and renewables. So what can we do?

We can try and switch to renewable energy and that might mean changing your external supplier and there are a whole raft of renewable energy suppliers now on the market and a lot of them offering very good deals. But you can also install renewable energies on your site, and this is our, we've we've got a picture there of our lecture theatre, and that's our air source heat pump that supplies our lecture theatre. And we've just put two new heat pumps in to supply our reception.

And we estimate that will save us around about 6000 pounds per annum in electricity bills, and they will pay for themselves within 1.5 years compared with the old, old fossil fuel system. We have put Carbon Trust turnoff stickers around the building and we encourage people to turn off stickers to turn off equipment when it's not in use.

Those stickers are available online and you can just print them off. They, the, the equipments like air conditioning, like active scavenging for your anaesthetic gases, like warm air devices, bear hugger warming devices have quite a big energy consumption for, for the energy that they produce. So if you can get those turned off in a timely fashion, that will, that will save quite a bit of energy.

And we've got our computers on an auto turnoff facility. So at 10 o'clock in the evening, those computers also turn off and that has the benefit of allowing the computers to update so it increases their protection against viruses. So for all of this kind of equipment, you can look for grants available from groups like the Carbon Trust and also the European Development Regional funding has still has funds available for for new energy efficient materials, and a lot of local councils will provide energy efficiency surveys free, but there are also tax incentives for things for certain types of energy efficient equipment and those are available online.

Water usage accounts for very little of our carbon footprint, but I think it's still worth thinking about because of the energy that is required to heat it and the fact that as a resource, water is predicted to become scarce scarce in some parts of the world, and access to clean water and sanitation is a concern on on the global scale. So there's a number of things that you can try and do to get the most out of the water that you're using. You can install grey water usage systems, which will take the, the washing water essentially and reuse it for things like for, watering plants and, and there's a number of other things you can do with greywater.

But you can also do things like put drought resistant planting in. So you're encouraging the biodiversity on your site as well as, reducing the amount of water that, that those plants need. There's quite a lot of discussion and argument about using reusable textiles versus disposable textiles.

So for instance, we have put in a load of reusable surgical hats into our theatre suite, and we're trying to encourage as many people to wear those as possible. But the the complaint is, well, don't we have to wash these? Isn't that using energy as well.

And it's true. It does use energy. But as far as I can tell, there's one article which has looked at 6 life cycle analyses and reusable textiles are less carbon intensive, use less water and less chemicals over their life cycle, compared with disposables.

But there's also a financial saving, and we save several 100 pounds every year through using the reusable hats rather than using disposables. And it's a really positive, cheerful, thing to do. We've also got some textile bear hugger blankets in, and there's 2 or 3 types of those available on the market as well.

Our only mistake with those is that they have a a plastic lining on the inside to try and direct the heat towards the patient. And as we discovered, they don't tumble dry, those those linings will melt, so the heat comes out of both sides. You can look into steam cleaners.

They do use electricity, but they reduce your water consumption by up to 90%, and the majority of them you can use without detergent, and they'll get you the same kind of bactericidal rates. So they're potentially a very good way of reducing your chemical and water consumption, as well as actually cleaning your floors well. And you can look into alcohol based scrub techniques, and those will reduce your water consumption and The chemical usage.

I want to briefly touch on paper, it's, it's not specific to healthcare, but we do generate a lot of paper. And you can try and mitigate the impact of that by ordering sustainable paper and the two major schemes globally, the FSC and the PEFC schemes which are fairly comparable in terms of their sustainability. And there's lots of ways that you can reduce the impact of paper consumption on your site.

You can print double sided. You can look for refillable or re manufactured cartridges, and some of those are quite a bit cheaper than the new ones as well. You can recycle the the new cartridges that you that you get.

You can switch to using email or online systems and try to discourage people from printing stuff. You can limit your colour printing and use plant-based things. But, so I think it's worth doing that and it's, we started monitoring all of our printer outputs so that we could target the highest consumption areas and try and see what we could do within those areas to reduce paper usage.

And I think it's important to do that. But there's an argument for saying, well, we should just be using computers instead of paper, and I think that we need to bear in mind that information and computer technology globally uses around about 1 to 2% of the total carbon emissions. And I found one study which suggested that if you're going to read an article very quickly, just scan an abstract, then probably electronic reading is less carbon intensive.

But if you're going to repeatedly read something or intensively read it, and it's going to take you a long time, then probably a paper copy is, is less carbon emitting. We have to remember that many of the electronic devices people don't use until they're dead, they replace them fairly regularly. They use heavy metals and rare metals, as well as chemicals, and they're not all recycled in the way that they should be.

So we need to bear in mind with information computer technology, it's, it's not the the total solution for, for every paper initiative. Now we have a very rough idea on our commuting data because we're based in a pretty rural location and we assume that if everybody drove in an average car to work at Davies's veterinary Specialists, our commuting emissions would represent 40% of our total carbon emissions. So this is clearly an area that we need to address, and it may be a similar or less concern depending on your location and your services.

Now for me, this is an area which I, it feels very tricky for us to deal with. We're in the middle of nowhere. We've got no public transport options.

We've got no footpaths, and we've got no street lighting to our site. So I feel very, cautious about saying to people, I want them to active travel to this site. I want them to cycle to this site or or walking.

I don't, I don't know, how, how safe that is as an option. So the first thing that we're doing is putting out a travel survey, and investors in the environment gave us a template for that. And we're in the process of collating the information from that to try and come up with what are the best options for our site, what are the things that people are most enthusiastic about and are going to be interested in signing up to.

So we've asked people about teleconferencing, about whether subsidies for lift sharing or for shuttle buses would be attempting proposition, whether if we put electric car charging points in, those would want to be used by staff, and we're pretty sure that our clients would be interested in using those. And again, there are government grants putting those in. There are electric bicycles that you can offer for your staff that are travelling to local local stations.

But one of the most useful pieces of advice we've had from Sustrans who we've been working with to try and support our active travellers, is that you need to look after those people who are travelling actively to the work site, and support those guys first and then move on to trying to engage new people. So things like cycle to work schemes, which is essentially a tax incentive for, for buying new bicycle equipment as well as bicycles. But providing decent storage and providing decent equipment and bicycle maintenance sessions and Sstrans will provide a lot of support in this area, including personalised travel planning and incentives and all sorts of things.

So it's worth getting in touch with them if that's an area that you're interested in. We know that active travel can result in 30% reductions in all cause mortality. So there are massive co-benefits to us engaging with not only active travel but also our green our green spaces.

And there is, it's an important part of your, your scheme and how you support biodiversity on your site. And we know that our mental and physical health is going to improve when we engage with our environment as well. And there are loads of environmental charities and wildlife trusts and groups who are really trying hard to engage people in in their various programmes.

And I highlight the RSPB's bird watching weekend on the 26th to 28th of January. There's online support for that, and you get to, sit and stare at your garden for an hour over the weekend with a cup of tea, and I will be doing that with some friends. There's a picture of my boyfriend here.

You can just see my my daughter out of shot, and they, they went planting trees. And, if he doesn't look as, as pleased as you might think for, for what he's doing for the environment, it was really, really cold that weekend. So we, we pretty much planted a few trees and then decided that we needed to go home and warm up.

Of course, the difficult part of all of this is getting people engaged and compliant with what you're doing. I want to just touch on a few of the things that we've done. Learning about our Green Group is part of our induction process at Davies's now, and there's a mandatory induction document which all have to read.

We take time to talk to people about the options and the changes that we're making. And, and it's generally a really positive and enjoyable process. We try to have green champions in most areas of the practise, and I now get emails from staff all over the practise with suggestions and resources they've come across and ideas that they want to get involved with.

And, and, and that's a really encouraging thing. We tried to put up a lot of signage, to try and help people. So for instance, for waste, having the right bin in the right place with a sign buying it, by telling you what should be in that bin, improves your compliance, no end.

And you need to make whatever you want people to, to do easy, and attractive and social. So if everybody knows what's happening with it and they know the benefit of it, they'll talk about it. And communicating the need to change is, is another area which is really important and a lot of that is done face to face here as well as through our official channels.

The posters that we've produced are available on our website and our marketing lady was happy to send those out to you. We found it's really important to use positive messages. So the classic example is this sign saying only 5% of people wash their hands correctly.

So the response to that is often, well, if only 5% of people doing it, I'm not going to do it. Why should I do it? So if you can use positive messages, you'll increase your compliance with with things that you're trying to do.

So we try to be facilitatory rather than disciplinary within Green Group. Another thing that we do is produce a quarterly newsletter which is emailed around, and we only print it to go on our notice board in our, in our saffron. And we try to put things that are happening in the practise, positive things that people can get involved with, a little bit of our, our site and our nature, to just get people engaged with what we're doing.

This is a tricky area to to discuss and, and it's a controversial area, and it's an area that a lot of people feel very strongly about. But I think it's worth mentioning that veterinary professionals have a cultural authority, that is, we are trusted within our communities. And we can use that to provide information on environmentally responsible pet ownership, for example, avoiding foods from non-sustainable sources, and also to lead by example.

And in that respect, it's worth considering where the high impact carbon areas of your own life are and what you can do to mitigate the impact. And they say you have to do something 21 days in a row for it to become a habit, so maybe changing one thing at a time or trying to just tweak things to, to do what you can. So I think it's worth having an idea of what the carbon impacts are and where you can have the biggest impact.

And more and more, I think clients will be looking to veterinary practise to provide leadership on issues which affect individuals, but also local communities and global communities. And I give you here the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and it's likely that many of these goals are built into any responsible practise anyway. But you can use these when you're planning your sustainability programme, and you can see which charitable actions you're already involved with that can be put under this umbrella of corporate social responsibility.

And then these things are likely to be valued by your client base, and they'll benefit your reputation as well as the environment. And you can use your Facebook feeds and local press and veterinary press to advertise what you're doing. We've had some amazing feedback and really positive pick up from our clients following our press releases about the investors in the environments of reward.

So it's something that increasingly people really do care about. So that's a very brief touch on the carbon impacts and the environmental impacts that, that I am, I've seen here at Davies's. And I want to touch on what you do next.

And there are two quotes here. One is by Maya Angelou, who says, do the best you can until you know better, and then when you know better, do better. So don't be afraid by not knowing or not feeling like you're going to be doing the best thing or feeling like you're gonna get criticised by, people for trying to change something, you know, that it won't be perfect.

And in fact, Voltaire said perfect is the enemy of good. We're trying to be better than we are at the moment. So my best advice in this area is do something.

And in fact, you've taken the first step today by coming to this seminar and, and I hope that you'll, you'll share what you've, what you've picked up. So what can you start with? You can start with your easy wins and these are the things which which we've done and I, I think we're just quite straightforward things that you can pretty much change tomorrow.

Once we started to get momentum with Green Group, we, we found that people took initiative under our umbrella. So one day I found these bamboo toothbrushes that turned up to clean the clippers with, and then everyone else just assumed that that that they, it was a Green group thing, and I said no, but somebody thought that this was a better idea and so they've just done it. So you find that once you start talking about these things, it cascades.

If you then want to move on, then these are the areas which I think are worth looking into next in terms of them being high impact and relatively easy to address. And again, you can get support from various, places for information on these areas. And we are hoping, we're working with the RCVS and BVA at the moment.

We're hoping that they're going to take this forward within FE Futures. So they've put it as a work stream and they're currently in the process of shaping some actions. So we're keeping in touch with them about what's happening there.

So it remains only for me to say. Please keep in touch. in the meantime, we will be, regularly updating our website, which has a sustainability section.

We're putting the things that we found positive on there. We update our Facebook feeds, and we're having live events, including a sustainability workshop in the spring, which we'll advertise in our CBD events on our website. But you have my email address there.

So if you have any questions about the things which we are doing, or the, suppliers that we're using, please do get into contact with me. And I'd be really keen to hear from you. Thanks very much.

Thank you, Ellie, that was fantastic and there was some lots of really useful information out there in that presentation. Because I'm sure, you were probably the same at the beginning where it's like, well, where do we start? And it sounds like the framework that, the investors environment have, provided helps give you that sort of focus.

As, Ellie has left some time, so if any of you do have any questions, please do, pop them in the Q&A box at the bottom, and, I'll ask those questions to Ellie. I think for me, Ellie, you know, you touched on it right at the very beginning, and it was that, area around culture. And, you know, how do you start to get that momentum, the buy-in from the team, but more importantly, the, the partners, the directors, and I think you said that you got on board quite quickly.

One of the directors, because there's a lot of noise, well everyone thinks that their groups take priority. In terms of infection control group, you know, compliance group, etc. So how did you start to demonstrate how the work that you were doing in your, the the team around the environmental sustainability could actually have a positive impact on some of the areas of the other people?

I guess we had to be taken seriously to start with, and that required us to know our stuff a little bit more. And that's what I found frustrating because I just assumed that that information was out there for me to take and present to them. So a lot of it was reading books like sustainable healthcare, so that I could go in with strong environmental arguments and say, look, this has to be more sustainable than this, and there are good options for us.

This is what we can do. So some of it was information gathering. I put a something like 3 page proposal into our board, about the benefits of joining investors in the environment in terms of the cost of what it would cost us versus the benefit.

And from a marketing point of view straight off it it paid for itself straight away. So that was so from from initial outlay point of view, the directors asked me at that point, what is the risk of this? And I said, the risk is that you pay the membership and it's no use and we don't pay next year.

So there wasn't much risk in that respect and there was only benefit. And we were very lucky in that we have some people who really care about the environment and really care about sustainability within, within our board of directors. So it wasn't difficult to convince them that it was a morally good thing to do.

So the last question was the question if somebody said, you, you say this is going to save us money, how much is it going to save you? And that was the question where I had to say, I, I really don't know. And then they said, how much time is it going to take you?

And I said, Well, I, I don't know. And what I, what I wanted to get across in this seminar is that we've done some of the legwork, and I want to share that with other people so they don't have to go through the same thing. But also that it saves you a lot of money and like I, I think I said, 4600 in the first year, and the most of the first year was spent us trying to collect data.

So we weren't even trying that hard. So I think, well, look what we can do when we're really trying. And I think that across the industry, we can do massive things.

So I think it's, it's, it's a process of a number of factors that, that you have to convince people by. That sounds, as I say, that sounds really useful. And I think, you know, that, it's me, it's sort of, controlling the expectations of the directors and stuff.

So, well, you know, as you say, it may cost us something, but let's try it and see. And I think, you know, that time aspect that you just was something you allude to is also gonna a question asked, because obviously, You know, you're anaesthetist as well. And so, you know, people, I'm sure there's a few, quite a few people who are doing this tonight thinking, well, I've already got a busy daytime job.

How much more work does it take on top of that sort of thing? How can I juggle, the two aspects of, you know, doing. My day job I'm passionate about it, and I'm keen to make this forward and how, you know, as you said, you've done a lot of that legwork that you can share the experiences.

But, you know, if for those people who think about that, what's, you know, on average, on a, on weekly average, how much time do you think you dedicate to, progressing the environmental agenda? I, I think, bear, bear in mind, I'm hoping that the amount of time I've spent put into it means that other people don't have to do the same. I mean, I'm, I'm putting a fair amount of time into it at the minute, but I'm trying to progress it not just within our industry but at a national level, so.

So, I'm not sure it's fair to compare that way, but what the way I look at it, I would like to walk away from this at Davies's and feel like it carries on as a philosophy. So I think the thing is to embed it as a philosophy, and that means that you have to get your whoever does your procurement, you just say to them, well, these, these are, this is what we're trying to achieve, and then you leave it with them to achieve it. They need, you need to empower people to do these things.

And the same with whoever buys your, your boilers, you need to empower them to say, OK, but this is, this is what our company cares about. We need to be buying energy efficient boilers. So we have various people, our procurement person, our accounts person.

Our account person now collects the data as part of her normal job. So when she gets the electricity data in, she just puts it into a spreadsheet. So I no longer have to do that.

We had to set up the spreadsheet and the management pack in the first year, and that took a lot of work. But I don't think it will be as much work ongoing now. And I hope that it isn't for other people because when other people are looking for a solution for waste, they can email me and I can give them the supplier, and then they contact them and it's done.

Yeah, no, fantastic. So it does, it does take some effort, as with anything, but the idea is to embed it in the philosophy into your practise and then it, then hopefully it's not your ongoing job. Yeah, no, definitely.

I think that is the key, that sounds like the key aspect is to having no, they're sharing the responsibility around. But I'm, I'm glad you mentioned about suppliers cos one of Emma has asked that question, which energy supplies do you use? Do you know that, or is that one for the procurement team or finance team to answer?

We are, we have a, a slightly awkward position in that we are tenants on this site. So we can't switch our electricity supplies as if we were the sole controllers of our suppliers, but we have other sites. But I mean, there's tonnes of renewable companies, there's, there's bulb, there's Octopus, there's ecotricity, there's green energy, oh sorry, good energy.

It's just a case of finding who supplies your area, who gives you the best deal, who has, they, they all have slightly different slants on what they, their environmental. What their policy is, what they, what they, what they believe and what their company is standing for. So in a way you can pick and choose whichever one of those suits you best, but I think the point is to support the renewable industry, which, whichever one suits you best.

No problem, and obviously a quick search on the internet will bring up all the relevant ones. David has messaged in to say that . They send all their recyclable packaging, er, cardboard, etc.

Back to the wholesaler who, er, he thinks are obliged to take it. Have you is is that something you've found from your experience? We, we have that many suppliers.

I'm not sure, I've never come across that before. If their supplier takes it back, that's fantastic. .

That's one of the things with waste disposal is that you have to sort of know what they're doing with it. So you, and that's why it's worth talking with whoever takes your waste away. And if your, if your, supplier is happy to take the packaging back and is going to recycle it or reuse it, then that's fantastic.

But it relies on having a relationship with them and understanding that's what happens. So one of the big things that we've, we've spent a lot of time on here is actually talking with our waste suppliers and in fact, changing our waste suppliers so that we're With people that we trust that when they say they are recycling this amount of it, or they're doing this with it or they're sending it for energy for incineration, whatever, we know that that's what's happening. So I've not come across that before, but if that company is doing that, then great, support them.

That's fantastic. Great, and then if I, can anyone recommend a good steam cleaner for a small practise? So if anyone, if anyone does have a, the name of a good steam cleaner for a small practise, then, please do, pop it in the, chat box or the Q&A box.

If they wanna, whoever is, is asking the question, if they want to email me, I've got 5 or 6, bids going through because we're trying to put a bid in for a steam cleaner at the minute, so. And it depends what you're trying to achieve. There are some that just do floors.

There are some that do kennels and floors. So, yeah, there's there's pros and cons, but again, there's, there's a tax incentive, the ECA, Capital allowance scheme, that's, that you can get, I think, well, if you buy on your pre pre-profit tax, pre-tax profits. So it's worth looking for a steam cleaner that's on that scheme so that you can make the most of that benefit.

But there are there are companies, like Duplex, like, . Matrix that have worked within the veterinary industry, so, and they're all, they're all NHS models. Fantastic.

So there you are, David. Ellie's email address is on that slide, but Dawn has also put it in the chat box as well. So please do drop Eli line should be able to advise.

Megan has messaged in, obviously we've talked about sort of the work around, Sort of, getting people involved, etc. And, but Megan said, what is the first step one could take in order to begin the process of becoming a green practise? Obviously, there's many different facets, but what, you know, would you say it's getting a team together around you that can drive that forward?

Like, or is it going out there and finding out, getting that information from you and almost becoming more knowledgeable to be able to take it forward? What would you say is that first critical step? I'd say you need, depending on the size of your practise, but you probably need 2 or 3 people that are passionate to drive it forward.

And it helps if those people have, power at the top and, are also on the work floor. So if you get somebody who's in, who's holding the purse strings and somebody who's actually working on the floor that knows what happens, Then that's a powerful team. You need, you need engagement from the top and from the bottom.

And if you look at big businesses, around about 50% of the initiatives start from the staff up and 50% start from the directors down. And it doesn't really matter which way it starts, but you have to have engagement from both sides, or it just does, it falls apart. So I think getting, getting a, kind of director or financial controller support of this is a good process, let's start this, and then getting, somebody who's working on the floor, getting them involved.

And then I think, I, I personally think the investors in the Environment scheme, they offer 3 different grades. The bronze level is really achievable. They offer you support and it'll pay for itself.

I mean, it'll pay for itself. So that, that's where I would start. No problem.

And I think, yeah, that's hopefully that's really useful for you there, Megan. And Emma's just come back and said any, does anyone return polystyrene packaging from refrigerated deliveries? Is there sort of a gold standard around that, Ellie?

There, there are, one of the, one of the slides I put, the various plastic recycling logos. And I think number 7 of the recycling plastic logos is not very easily recycled and probably only numbers 1 and 2 are easily recyclable plastics and polystyrene comes as, I don't know, 4 or 5 or something. It's not that easy to recycle.

So if you can, if you can get it back in for reuse, obviously, that's high up the waste hierarchy, that's great. But it's, you've got infection control and backhaul costs, and not all suppliers will take them back. So if you can find somewhere that will recycle them, that's great.

But if you can find a way of not using them in the first place, and I think that it's down to us to put a bit of pressure on our suppliers to say, does this really need polystyrene? Can we have another option? So I don't know the answer to that specific question, but I think it's a really, really valid point.

No worries, thank you very much. So I think we're nearing the end of the webinar. If anyone has got any burgeoning questions, please do type it in now.

For me, I'd just like to make you all aware that we've got our virtual congress coming up this weekend. And on the Saturday, from 11 until 12:30, we're gonna be focusing on the issue of plastics. We've got 3 fantastic speakers lined up, talking about the issues of is plastic a silent killer, plastic pollution and how as vets we can be part of the solution.

And also Iceland's crusade against plastic pollution. That is, I hasten to add, Iceland, the supermarket rather than Iceland, the country, just in case they're clear of any ambiguity there. So we've got a speaker and obviously Iceland announced, last year, it was now, that they aim to be the first, supermarket to have, all their packaging as non-plastic.

So there's some 3 great webinars. It is, free for you to attend. Dawn has put in the chat box a link.

So, for you, those of you who are members, you will automatically be enrolled, for our virtual congress. You'll receive the information, so please do join in for that session. For those who aren't members, then, please do sign up via the link in the chat box and you'll have complimentary access to those three sessions and hope you can join us there.

So that is my shameless plug for that bit. I don't seem to be any other questions. But as Ellie says, Ellie's put her email address there.

So if you do have any questions, this is something that as Ellie said, is she is speaking to the RCVS and BVA about. So we are trying to move this forward. It's something that our chief executive at the webinar, vet, Anthony Chadwick, is also very passionate about and is really keen to support the industry on, hence is working.

With Davies, the, veterinary specialist this evening, because this is what, some of the issues and some of the areas we want to bring really to light within the industry. So please do, engage with us on this and obviously, contact Ellie going forward. We have also got a short survey at the end of this webinar, so please do complete that.

That'd be really great if you could do that, because it's always good to get feedback from yourselves. So, that brings us to the end of tonight's webinar. So first of all, I'd like to say, thank you to Dawn, who has been on hand, putting in little, links and all the rest of it.

So thank you very much, Dawn. And she's also popped in a link to the survey there if you don't have that on your browser. Thank you very much to all of yourselves that have attended.

I hope you've found it useful and it's given you some really good. Information on where to start your environmental journey in your practise. And obviously, last but not least, thank you very much to Ellie for putting together such a brilliant presentation.

The presentation will be available, online, on our website, within the next 48 hours, so you can watch again, pick up any points. But yeah, no, thank you very much, Ellie, really appreciate it and we look forward to continue working with you in the future. Cheerio then.

Good night, bye.