Sustainability Profile: Vet Sustain
Championing sustainability in the veterinary professions.
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Sustainability Case Study: Synergy Farm Health
Vet Sustain is a community interest company which aims to inspire and enable veterinary professionals on sustainability issues, to continually improve the health and wellbeing of animals, people and the environment. Their aim is to enable veterinary professionals to be driving forces for change towards a more sustainable future.
Vet Sustain has published six goals to highlight the roles of veterinary professionals in addressing the multiple challenges facing society; these goals provide a framework for how the veterinary profession can contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
#1 Diverse and abundant wildlife - conserve and enhance natural landscapes, habitats and the biological diversity and abundance of wild terrestrial and aquatic plant and animal species.#2 A good life for animals - safeguard and advocate for the health and welfare, in life and at the point of death, of animals under our care and those that are affected by human activity.
#3 Net zero warming - implement and promote decarbonisation through energy efficiency, the generation and use of renewable energy, mitigation of global warming and sequestration of carbon.
#4 Health and happiness - safeguard and enhance the physical and mental wellbeing of people and support a transition to livelihoods and lifestyles that are fit for the future.#5 A no-waste society - minimise the usage and disposal of resources and materials, and support a transition to a circular economy.#6 Enough clean water for all - uphold best practice in freshwater conservation and protection to mitigate water stress and prevent water pollution.
Vet Sustain offers valuable resources, education and support to veterinary practices and professionals, wherever you are on your sustainability journey.
Here are just some of the resources Vet Sustain provide:
Created by Vet Sustain in partnership with BVA, BVNA and SPVS, the Vet Sustain Greener Veterinary Practice Checklist outlines the points your practice may consider to become more sustainable, and provides you with links to available guidance and green options.
This FREE series of webinars focus on different aspects of the Greener Veterinary Practice Checklist and enable you to bring these principles to your workplace. These webinars have been co-hosted by the BVA and VDS and include:
Empowering the team
Using water and energy responsibly
Sustainable surgery & the use of consumables
Using medicines responsibly
Click here for more information
A list of environmentally conscious products, services, and educational resources available from suppliers and organisations working within the veterinary sector. This list of recommendations will help you to make sustainable procurement decisions to reduce the environmental impact of your clinical work.
Click on the image below to view or download the list.
The Veterinary Carbon Calculator, developed in collaboration with Investors in the Environment (iiE), is tailored to the impacts of a veterinary practice. Your calculation will help you to understand your practice’s environmental impact and the supporting resources will help you get started with tailoring your carbon action plan.
Read this blog post from the Vet Sustain team to learn more about how it works.
Get started calculating!
This self-paced LANTA accredited online course aims to empower veterinary professionals working with farm animals to help producers attain multiple sustainability objectives – for the benefit of the animals under our care, rural communities, wildlife and the wider environment. Take a look at the course curriculum and some free lesson previews
This course allows you to better understand the basics of climate science, how the veterinary profession is impacting our climate and how climate change impacts the veterinary profession. Are you curious to explore the solutions you can implement in practice, and gain confidence in talking about the changes you’re making and why, with clients, colleagues and suppliers? Accredited by the Carbon Literacy Project, email hello@vetsustain.org to register your interest in future Carbon Literacy courses.
Find out more
For more information about Vet Sustain, check out their website: https://vetsustain.org/
Synergy Farm Health is a large farm-focused practice serving farms across Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Wiltshire and beyond. Their main base and practice dispensary is at Rampisham in Dorset.
We began our sustainability journey in 2021, forming an initial focus group to consider both our operational carbon footprint and the wider implications of what our business does. We are proud of the fact that much of our ‘bigger picture’ environmental impact is influenced in a positive way by the role that our vets, advisers and technicians have every day in improving farming efficiency and animal welfare. We focus on preventative planning and health care, and together with our clients we are constantly engaging in carbon issues in agriculture. However, we are not blinkered and know there is still much to be done on an operational level.
We operate a Green Group to suggest and implement ideas for things like energy saving, reducing waste and sourcing product alternatives. An internal WhatsApp group works well for bouncing ideas around and we are looking to engage in the RCVS environmental standards scheme which looks like it will provide a useful guiding framework to push things forward. Identifying like-minded resource-efficient companies such as NVS with their take-back of cardboard is hugely important to us.
Whilst we have begun to invest in a few major changes such as electric transport, the smaller things are also very important.
One thing we would like to see is the removal of some packaging at the source rather than the focus on recyclability. An example of one of our successes here is with the oblong hard-plastic flip-top boxes which each contain an individual tube of a well-known brand's TB needles. Any practice involved in TB testing will be familiar with these! I had long been vaguely frustrated by these cases and wondered how we vets were all individually disposing of them - probably mostly into landfill - so I asked our dispensary department for help.
Jean Gibson, NVS and stock control and Green Group member
My tip - don’t fall into the trap of thinking any change is too small to make a difference. Picture the cumulative impact of what you decide now as if you had started it ten years ago – and just do it!
We contacted the brand directly to ask whether we could collect these up and post them back for re-use. The reply came back that we could just get the needle packs without the hard casing, which of course was an even better solution and gratefully received! We have been doing this ever since and have not had any issues with the supply of needle pack tubes without their individual outer casings.
This might seem like one very small and insignificant change, however, we use something approaching 200 needle packs per year, and each of the empty plastic casings weighed 4g, so around 800g of hard plastic per year has been saved by a simple call. Over a 10-year period that’ll be a whopping 8kg saved – just picture a boxful of that many empties! - and so the cumulative effect goes on…..
I recently contacted the brand to check that this is indeed an actual physical saving and they are not just discarding the casings at their end instead of ours – they confirmed that these casings are indeed never made, although they still supply to other practices using them.
This illustrates that the mantra “REFUSE, REDUCE, Re-use, Recycle” is a good one, and recycling rightly occupies the lowest place on this list.
We all know the linear process of single-use plastic packaging and products is a huge and unsustainable problem. Recycling is universally considered a ‘good’ thing, and indeed we should continue to do it, but at best it only delays the progression of the downward spiral to eventual waste whilst often creating its own issues along the way. Yet it is still touted by far too many companies as their answer to sustainability.
Refusal or removal of extraneous packaging or products at source is vastly preferable as a means of reducing our environmental impact in so many ways. We just need to identify more opportunities for this!
Click here to find out more about Synergy Farm Health.
