Chicago, IL, June 21--In 2002, Kaiser Permanente, the country's largest non-profit health-care system, issued an unusual mandate to a longtime supplier: Create a quality carpet without the controversial chemical polyvinyl chloride, or forget about winning any more contracts, according to the Chicago Tribune.
"We don't want products that contain carcinogens, mutagens--chemicals that cause a mutation of the genes--or reproductive toxins," said Kathy Gerwig, Kaiser Permanente's director of environmental stewardship.
Last week, a carpet manufacturer, Dalton, Ga.-based Tandus Group Inc., said that it had met the challenge.
Tandus made the announcement in Chicago at the NeoCon conference, North America's largest trade show for office furniture and a prime venue for manufacturers to tout technological and design breakthroughs.
The achievement earned Tandus a $5 million-a-year contract to cover floors in most of the 20 new hospitals--with 30 million square feet of floor space--that Kaiser Permanente says it will build in the next decade.
Health and environmental concerns increasingly raised by the health-care industry, which are spurring development of healthier equipment and furnishings, are likely to have a ripple effect on consumers and the workplace as a whole.
"The health-care market is starting to educate other markets about the long-term impact of a wide variety of products on people's health," said Jamie Harvie, who works with Health Care Without Harm, a coalition of 437 organizations in 52 countries.
Hospital purchasing organizations, including Schaumburg-based Consorta Inc. and Premier Inc. of San Diego, pledged to purchase hospital equipment and supplies free of mercury, if a substitute was available, by the end of 2004.
"It's worked--manufacturers are phasing out these products," said Gina Pugliese, vice president of Premier's Safety Institute in Oak Brook.
The market power of the purchasing groups is extensive, with Consorta ordering about $3.3 billion worth of products a year on behalf of 475 acute-care hospitals nationwide. Last year, Premier bought $17 billion in supplies for the roughly 1,500 hospitals it serves.
Now the purchasing organizations want to reduce the use of harmful materials in computers, such as certain flame retardants that have been found to cause neurological damage in mice.
Jean Livingston, Consorta's director of organizational effectiveness, said that imposing higher environmental standards can raise the threat of higher costs. "That's the fallback for manufacturers--they will always say: 'Sure we'll do this, but it will cost more," Livingston said . But "we need to really start pushing on this cost issue, because people aren't taking into consideration the true costs of these potentially toxic materials, especially when they are so widespread--as they are in computers." Apple Computer Inc. already is replacing the plastic exterior casings on its laptop computers with metal, negating the need for a flame retardant.
Still, Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente is perhaps the most dramatic example of a company dictating to a manufacturer how it should make its product.
"Kaiser Permanente's commitment to avoid PVC due to its environmental health hazards is helping drive a growing market demand for safer alternatives that are competitively priced and superior in performance," said Tom Lent of the Healthy Building Network, a group that advocates "green building" techniques.
