KitNewCare leaflet_Dutch version

Most of what has been published on sustainable kidney care measures one thing: environmental impact, usually carbon. KitNewCare was designed on the premise that this is not enough, and a group of the project's publications is now mapping what the field still does not know.

Anyone who has attempted a life cycle assessment in healthcare knows where the work actually goes. Not in the modelling, but in the weeks beforehand: dismantling every consumable in a treatment pathway, weighing each component, identifying each polymer, and reconstructing the clinical process in enough detail that the inventory means something. It is unglamorous, it is slow, and it is repeated from scratch by nearly every team that tries.

If a dialysis service wanted to reduce its environmental impact by choosing between haemodialysis and online haemodiafiltration, a KitNewCare study in Modena has an unhelpful answer: it barely matters. The more useful finding sits elsewhere in the same numbers.