In Essen it is up to Tobias Emler to achieve great things in small steps.

His employer, the local university hospital, wants to develop into a “sustainable and green hospital”.

That's how the clinic put it.

The fact that a lot can be understood by this makes the business economist's work a little easier, on the one hand.

On the other hand, it also forces the junior manager to emphasize things that are taken for granted from time to time.

He says: "We don't just want to paint ourselves green." And he means the projects he is currently working on.

"There has to be a change in corporate culture."

Kim Bjorn Becker

Editor in Politics.

  • Follow I follow

On the campus of the clinic in the Ruhr area, Emler is therefore making a careful change through approach, and how small the steps are sometimes becomes clear right at the beginning of the tour.

A summer's day, Emler is standing in the blazing sun on a green strip between two clinic buildings, not far from the main entrance.

He watches as two gardeners pull up in a tanker and water an area where the lawn is higher than the surrounding area.

Emler says: "We said, okay, wildflowers are also important." A little more nature is good for the employees during the break and the patients who walk across the campus.

And it is a home for insects, keyword biodiversity.

It soon becomes clear why the clinic defines the term sustainability rather softly.

If it were only about hard currencies such as electricity consumption, even a committed man like Tobias Emler would quickly reach his limits.

In a hospital, some of whose technical equipment runs around the clock, you can't even just pull the plug.

Without bright light, the surgeon cannot see where he is cutting, and without constant cooling, the radiologist's expensive magnetic resonance tomograph will break.

10,000 kilowatt hours of electricity for each hospital bed

Globally, healthcare accounts for just over four percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than aviation and shipping combined.

The German healthcare system is even responsible for more than five percent of national greenhouse gas emissions - and hospitals, with their hunger for energy, are likely to have a significant share in this.

In Germany, the operation of each hospital bed consumes an average of around 10,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, more than twice as much as a medium-sized household with three people.

This was the result of a report by the German Hospital Institute on behalf of the German Hospital Society (DKG).

The experts wrote to almost 1,400 general hospitals last year and received detailed information from every fifth hospital.

According to this, every hospital needs an average of almost five million cubic meters of gas per year for heating - this corresponds to the consumption of around 3000 single-family houses.

The authors of the study believe that large savings are possible.

"The potential is huge, especially in the energy and electricity sectors," says Anna Levsen from the German Hospital Institute.

All over Germany, hospital boards have discovered the topic of sustainability.

The large private hospital chain Helios wants to take the lead and achieve measurable results.

The approximately 90 hospitals are to halve their CO2 emissions in eight years, as Helios boss Robert Möller recently announced in the FAS.

When it comes to ventilation and lighting, heating and cooling, there are “considerable efficiency reserves,” said Möller.

He did not say what exactly should be saved.

According to the study by the hospital association, two thirds of all hospitals stated last year that they record and monitor their key consumption figures - after all, a prerequisite for targeted savings.

Slightly more than every third hospital had already formulated guidelines and objectives as to how it intends to save resources.

41 percent of the houses had a concrete concept for saving energy with lighting.

And almost every third clinic employs its own climate manager who takes care of everything.