Response to ‘Healthcare and ecological economics at a crossroads’

Editor—We thank Odefey and colleagues¹ for their thoughtful letter. The authors were appreciative of our article, but were concerned that we did not comprehensively explore issues regarding water use for cleaning reusable anaesthetic equipment. Our article primarily considered the financial costs and carbon footprints associated with processing reusable and single-use anaesthetic equipment.² We did examine all other environmental footprints routinely examined in life cycle assessment, but noted that apart from water use, these footprints were small and varied little between approaches. Most of the water use for the reusable equipment stemmed from the washer loads (70% total water use).

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