• Energy Research

Health care accounts for 9-10% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States. Strategies for monitoring these emissions at the hospital level are needed to decarbonize the sector. However, data collection to estimate emissions is challenging, especially for smaller hospitals. We explored the potential of gradient boosting machines (GBM) to impute missing data on resource consumption in the 2020 survey of a consortium of 283 hospitals participating in Practice Greenhealth. GBM imputed missing values for selected variables in order to predict electricity use and beef consumption (R2=0.82) and anesthetic gas desflurane use (R2=0.51), using administrative data readily available for most hospitals. After imputing missing consumption data, estimated GHG emissions associated with these three examples totaled over 3 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions (MTCO2e). Specifically, electricity consumption had the largest total carbon footprint (2.4 MTCO2e), followed by beef (0.6 million MTCO2e) and desflurane consumption (0.03 million MTCO2e) across the 283 hospitals. The approach should be applicable to other sources of hospital GHGs in order to estimate total emissions of individual hospitals and to refine survey questions to help develop better intervention strategies.

Standardization, and thereby acceptance of any construction material requires years of testing and analysis. For structural bamboo, prototype model standards, in the form of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) documents on bamboo design, testing and construction are available. While these provide useful guidelines, an important and often overlooked consideration in developing test methods is that these must be usable and reliably repeatable in the environment in which they are most expected likely to be used. The present work investigates the potential for adopting the relatively simple-to-conduct edge bearing test as an indirect means of obtaining the critical, although otherwise difficult-to-obtain transverse material properties. Expanding previous studies on transverse material properties, the research explores the effect of through-culm-wall fiber gradation on the edge bearing, or diametric compression, strength of full-culm bamboo. The test method utilizes a full culm section cut into two or three concentric annular sections. Tests results for each ring provide a measure of through thickness transverse properties. The objective of this work is the development of practical test methods for field assessment of bamboo material properties.