How Vail Health is pursuing sustainability goals to promote human and environmental health
Health care system receives award for sustainability work, including 2024 diversion rate of 26%
Vail Health/Courtesy photo
Vail Health is continually making its system more sustainable to promote a healthier future for its patients, staff and the environment.
Tim Ivancich, Vail Health’s sustainability supervisor, has led the sustainability department for nearly six years.
“Human health is directly affected by our environmental health,” Ivancich said. “If we don’t protect our environmental health, we are going to start to see (health) issues in humans … The ecosystem services and environment help protect our human health through many different ways, and we need to help protect those ecosystem services.
The “triple bottom line” is “planet, profit, people,” Ivancich said.
Protecting the health of the planet also protects the health of individuals, because people can be supported and sickened by the environment in which they live.
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Helping the environment also makes business sense, because there are cost savings in sustainability, from reducing building-wide energy bills to paying lower costs to recycle waste rather than send it to the landfill.
Vail Health increases diversion rate, reduces greenhouse gas emissions
Vail Health has committed to sustainability improvements across the board, from diverting more waste from the landfill to reducing the amount of energy its buildings use.
“Everywhere in the organization, there is an opportunity to reduce waste, reduce greenhouse gases,” Ivancich said.
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In 2025, Vail Health received the Partner Recognition Award, an Environmental Excellence Award from Practice Greenhealth. Practice Greenhealth is a third-party network that evaluates health care entities for their environmental sustainability. The award recognizes facilities that have committed to and achieved environmental improvement, like waste reduction and renewable energy adoption, across several areas of the organization.
The Partner Recognition Award requires that organizations have a diversion rate — the amount of waste that is recycled or composted rather than going to the landfill — of at least 10%.
In 2024, Vail Health’s diversion rate was 26%.
This is due in large part to the sustainability team’s efforts on composting and cardboard recycling.
Vail Health has had a composting program for five years, mainly at its locations that serve food — the hospital in Vail and its Edwards campuses (Shaw Cancer Center and Precourt Healing Center).
Vail Health’s composting program has grown significantly over the last few years, producing more than 71,000 pounds of compost from its Vail campus alone in 2024, up from 51,000 pounds in 2021.
The growth can be attributed to adding more composting bins as well as ongoing education from the sustainability department and a widespread adoption of composting among Vail Health staff.
“It shows the commitment of our partners and teams and staff throughout the organization,” Ivancich said. “Having the buy-in from our staff, all 2,000 of them, is pretty cool to see.”
Vail Health currently works with the hauler Apex Waste Solutions, which is starting a composting program in the valley.
The easiest materials to recycle are cardboard and aluminum cans, according to Ivancich.
When the new hospital building was built, the decision was made to include a cardboard compactor.
“Cardboard is one of the most profitable things to recycle, so we’ve gone out of our way as an organization to make sure we’re providing the cleanest stream to the local materials recovery facility as we can by having that cardboard compactor,” Ivancich said.
In 2024, Vail Health recycled 91,000 pounds of clean, separated cardboard, accounting for 12% of the system’s total waste for the year.
“It has been cool to see the way our cardboard recycling continues to grow and grow and grow,” Ivancich said.
Vail Health’s remaining diversions come from electronic waste recycling, metal recycling, single-stream recycling and equipment donations.
In 2024, Vail Health diverted over 43,000 pounds of mixed recycling from the landfill, a 56% increase from 2021.
The sustainability team is also addressing Vail Health’s energy portfolio, both to meet state standards for emissions for buildings over 50,000 square feet and to reduce the system’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Vail Health aims to tackle single-use medical waste next
While Vail Health has grown by leaps and bounds in its composting and recycling programs with standard materials, the health care system has unique challenges in the amount of single-use items its providers use.
For the last three years, Vail Health has worked with a company called Stericycle to recycle its single-use nitrite gloves. To date, Vail Health has recycled 66,000 pairs of gloves.
“That’s a really exciting new program that everybody in the hospital wants to partake in,” Ivancich said.
Only clean gloves, with no biohazard exposure, can be recycled.
The health care system also works with Stericycle to reuse and recycle its sharps containers. Vail Health sends full sharps containers to Stericycle, which empties and cleans the containers, then returns them to Vail Health.
“Where normal sharps containers get one use, ours get 400 to 500 uses before they get shredded and turned back into another sharps container,” Ivancich said.
“The next frontier is our clinical areas and trying to reduce waste in there,” Ivancich said.
“Most things are single-use, most things are wrapped in plastic, and that’s to promote sterility. We want to stay sterile, we want to stay clean,” Ivancich said.
Ivancich’s team is working with operating rooms and patient care units to find areas to reprocess items to reduce waste, such as sending drill bits and saw blades to a third-party company to be cleaned and sterilized, rather than disposed of after one use.
