“I haven’t come across as many barriers as you’d expect.”
Anna Lisa Mills, SmartCarbon and Newcastle Hospitals
“Find your allies – the people who can connect you to the right stakeholders,” is the advice to innovators from Anna Lisa Mills, sustainability manager at Newcastle Hospitals and founder of SmartCarbon, a digital platform that helps organisations measure and reduce their carbon footprints. “Since joining the NHS five years ago, I haven’t come across as many barriers as you’d expect,” she says. “Okay, the bureaucracy’s a pain, but the buy-in to sustainability is there.”
A chartered environmentalist and lecturer at Northumbria University, Mills started the SmartCarbon business with support from the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, which provided funding for a pilot with the Newcastle trust.
SmartCarbon developed a bespoke version of the platform, which included hospital-specific metrics like anaesthetic gases. It’s now used by 17 NHS trusts, as well as bakery chain Greggs, Newcastle United football club, Surrey county cricket club and Durham Cathedral. Mills’s work with Newcastle Hospitals led to her joining the trust – after “completing lots of conflict of interest paperwork”, she says – working three days a week while still serving as a director of SmartCarbon.
Decarbonising the supply chain is “the biggest sustainability challenge we face in the NHS”, Mills explains. Instead of simply estimating them, Newcastle now supports suppliers to measure their own emissions, which are fed through to the trust’s ‘footprint plus’ data.
Mills would like to see the ten year plan “treat the climate emergency as a health emergency”. Pointing out that air pollution is now the fourth biggest killer in the UK, she says: “It’s not a nice-to-have bolt-on, it’s core to human health.”
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