Sustainability Paradox: Why the Most Advanced Hospitals Must Also Be Green
Clinical excellence and environmental responsibility are not competing priorities, they are the same, Aymeric Lim said.
Healthcare exists to heal people, yet the sector accounts for 4-5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hospitals are major contributors to environmental harm that threatens their very purpose. In 2025, the National University Hospital (NUH) in Singapore became the world's first hospital to achieve Healthcare Sustainability Certification, a joint award from the Joint Commission International and the International Hospital Federation’s Geneva Sustainability Centre.
NUH also earned a 5-Leaf rating, the top tier in Newsweek and Statista's World's Greenest Hospitals 2026 ranking, making it the first and only hospital in Singapore with this distinction. These achievements highlight that sustainability is not a side project or marketing line, but a test of whether hospitals can be advanced in every sense of the word.
Many sustainability decisions have proven to be clinically and operationally sound. For example, transitioning away from a potent anesthetic gas saved over 1,900 tons of CO2 emissions and reduced costs by $577,000 between 2021 and 2023, without compromising patient outcomes. Similar improvements were seen in antibiotic prescription rates and couch paper usage, leading to lower costs, reduced adverse events, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Sustainability initiatives have also improved quality of care. By redesigning recycling as a workflow, paper recycling rose by 47% and plastic recycling by 230% in just two weeks. This shift marks a move away from treating recycling as a behavior to perform, to designing a system that makes it the easier path.
The goal is to lower emissions per patient by 5% by 2023, which is a modest number on a single line of a report, but an enormous achievement considering the operational complexity. Looking ahead, sustainability should be designed into the very bones of future hospitals, with green healing spaces, solar panels, green roofs, and smart building management systems.
These elements should be integrated into the design plan from the beginning, treating environmental stewardship as a core clinical competence. After all, the communities we serve are also the ones bearing the heaviest costs of climate change, and a hospital that harms these conditions is not truly healthy.
Written by urgent.news from Newsweek's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
