The Movement Toward Environmental Sustainability in GI Jill K. J. Gaidos, MD, FACG in Conversation with Rabia A. De Latour, MD and Swapna Gayam, MD, FACG
Dr. Jill Gaidos talks to Dr. Rabia de Latour, Assistant Professor at NYU Langone and Director of Endoscopy at Bellevue Hospital, and Dr. Swapna Gayam, Associate Professor at West Virginia University, on the movement toward environmental sustainability in GI.
Conversations with Women in GI JG: What got each of you interested in environmental sustainability as it relates to healthcare and GI endoscopy? SG: For me, at home we had been doing a lot of things—recycling, reducing and composting. Also, I grew up in India where nothing went to waste, or you didn’t buy what you didn’t need. And one day I noticed at work one of our endoscopy nurses dumping everything into a trashcan and that appalled me. When I looked through that can there were a lot of things that could be recycled or were not even used. The amount of waste after every procedure and at the end of the day was shocking. That's what got me started. And around the same time, I came across a paper in Gastroenterology by Williams, Kao and Omary (Williams JA, Kao JY, Omary MB. How can individuals and the GI community reduce climate change. Gastroenterology 2020;158(1):14-7). It's a fantastic paper and there is a great editorial in response to the article by Kevin Skole at Penn Med. Those two articles are great for starters to know about our personal and professional carbon footprint. That is where it started for me.
“We started to gain momentum after a few 'low-hanging fruit' initiatives that actually saved money and lowered costs, and now I have a ton of support. And I have to say that the sustainability folks at my hospital have been amazing because I'm only helping their bottom line by enlisting clinicians to join their efforts.” —Dr. Rabia de Latour
JG: I would also recommend reading your Red Section article from 2020 for further background information (Gayam S. Environmental Impact of Endoscopy: “Scope of the Problem”. Am J Gastroenterol 2020;115:19311931). What about for you, Rabia? RDL: I’ve always cared about sustainability and made an effort to be a good “citizen of the world,” but it wasn’t until my first child was born in 2017 that I really started to think about how our actions will impact future generations. I think what they're going to be the angriest about is our degree of waste, how we perpetuated practices that we inherited from previous generations without thorough consideration of the wellbeing of future generations. I want my children and future generations to have the same quality of life that I grew up with—a very happy, carefree childhood and adulthood. I started to think about things we could do at home. My husband actually trades energy, and he has been a great educator in terms of simple things like renewables, non-renewables, how are we going to transition to renewable energy. We are already doing a lot at home. We have minimized our waste, virtually eliminated single use products from our lives; we compost and we recycle. We were already doing everything we could within our household, and so I wanted to cast a larger net to have a bigger impact and I believed the best way to do that is in the workplace. As you know, we can rattle off 100 different statistics to you about how bad healthcare is for the environment as an industry, not only for the U.S. but also globally (for more information see Haddock R, de Latour R, Siau K et al. Climate Change and Gastroenterology: Planetary Primum Non Nocere and How Industry Must Help Am J Gastroenterol 2022;117:394400). So, I figured the best way to do this was through a very measured and directed approach on how to go about this. I started by meeting with the sustainability experts at our hospital. I don’t have any formal training in this; I’m just a concerned citizen. I learned as much as I could from them, and
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