Inclusive of labor, the reusable central venous catheter insertion kits were less expensive than were the single-use kits. For our hospital, which uses brown coal-sourced electricity, the environmental costs of the reusable kit were considerably greater than those of the single-use kit. Efforts to reduce the environmental footprint of reusable items should be directed towards decreasing the water and energy consumed in cleaning and sterilization. The source of hospital electricity significantly alters the relative environmental effects of reusable items.

We modelled the financial and environmental costs of two commonly used anaesthetic plastic drug trays. We proposed that, compared with single-use trays, reusable trays are less expensive, consume less water and produce less carbon dioxide, and that routinely adding cotton and paper increases financial and environmental costs. We used life cycle assessment to model the financial and environmental costs of reusable and single-use trays. From our life cycle assessment modelling, the reusable tray cost (Australian dollars