Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, a multispecialty hospital, reduced the amount of domestic water it was using by 30 per cent - saving more than four Olympic swimming pools worth of water per month - in the first nine months of the year.

According to a report released today by the hospital’s in-house sustainability team, monthly water usage within the hospital fell from 28,787 cu m in December 2016 to 19,830 cu m in September 2017.

That means that over the first nine months of 2017, without compromising patient safety and while providing excellent care, the hospital has saved more than 20 million gallons of water – enough to fill 400,000 baths or nearly 40 Olympic swimming pools.

By using condensed water from the air conditioning system for irrigation and by changing the plant mix in its grounds to include more native species, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi succeeded in cutting the amount of mains water it used for irrigation by two thirds.

Irrigation water usage fell from 3,978 cu m in December 2016 to just 1,092 cu m in September 2017 – saving the equivalent of one and a half Olympic swimming pools worth of water a month.

From last month -- November 2017 -- around 70 per cent of Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi’s hot water demand has been met by solar water heaters – something which will save the hospital Dh750,000 ($204 million) a year on its utility bills and further reduce the hospital’s carbon footprint.

“Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi was designed to meet the highest sustainability standards in the GCC,” said Mawadhah Al Hashemi, sustainability manager at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. “In the journey of sustainability, we cannot afford to rest on our laurels – we are constantly looking for ways to innovate and reduce our use of resources including water and electricity.”

“The healthcare industry globally is one of the most resource-intensive commercial occupiers in the world and I am very proud our hospital continues to work hard every day to become more and more environmentally sustainable.”

To reduce carbon emissions, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi this year became one of the first hospitals in the Mena region to use a ‘greenhouse gas tool’ to quantify and exhaustively log the exact amounts of greenhouse gas emissions the hospital produces in the hope of then being able to reduce them.

In 2014, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi became the largest hospital in the GCC to have been awarded a Leed (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold sustainability certificate for new construction.

The hospital has been designed to include an innovative ‘double skin’ exterior which provides an air buffer between the indoor and outdoor environment, reducing the amount of cooling the iconic building requires.

In contrast to Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi’s sustainability efforts, hospitals typically use around twice the amount of energy of similarly-sized office buildings and the number of new hospitals opening across the GCC region is set to grow by more than 10 per cent over the next three years.

“By highlighting the sustainability results that Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi is achieving throughout the year, we hope that others in the healthcare sector will take their own steps to reduce water and energy consumption and find new ways to become more resource-efficient in their operations,” Al Hashemi concluded.- TradeArabia News Service