GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — In a hospital setting, it takes a lot of work to cut down on the amount of medical waste. Bellin Hospital has tried to combat that by cutting back on garbage where they can, in the kitchen.
“The hospital waste is generally very hard to get rid of, there is not a lot you can do with it all the medical waste has to be picked up and handled differently and a lot of our food waste just was just going into the trash,” says Steven Reinders, food and nutrition team leader for Bellin Hospital.
Items placed in the trash go down the road and into landfills. But five pound buckets are popping up around the kitchen, the cafeteria and the coffee shops throughout the hospital.
“The process is pretty simple, we just fill up these big buckets and then once a week we put them outback where Corey (from Greener Bay Compost) will come and collect them.” said Reinders.
Bellin is among a few local businesses that Greener Bay Compost has been servicing. Previously the compost company has been working primarily with residential customers, but CEO Cory Groshek says he's been seeing a lot more commercial work.
"Bellin is working with us, and NWTC has been working with us along with some of the other businesses in town, and it's great to see bigger companies take that step toward sustainability," Groshek says.
Groshek says that his weekly numbers typically look like 800 pounds from residential areas and 500 pounds of commercial compost, but he is hoping that those numbers will continue to grow as more and more businesses look into composting as an option.
But sustainability has been on the minds of those at Bellin for a while now.
“This actually started about 10 years ago, we switched out all our Styrofoam for compostable paper. They were still going into landfills but we figured they are better going into landfills being compostable than they old Styrofoam,” said Reinders. “But there is so much more we plan to do in the future, even since starting this we have seen so many areas that could be worked on.”
At the moment Bellin estimates that they have been composting about 200 to 250 pounds each week, which put them on track to reach more than 5 tons by the end of 2023.
For more information about how you can compost visit gbcompost.com.
