{"id":65977,"date":"2019-09-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/newsroom\/2019\/09\/10\/livegreen-evs-appreciation-week\/"},"modified":"2022-09-02T17:35:20","modified_gmt":"2022-09-02T22:35:20","slug":"livegreen-evs-appreciation-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/newsroom\/2019\/09\/10\/livegreen-evs-appreciation-week\/","title":{"rendered":"LiveGreen: EVS Appreciation Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Environmental Services (EVS) Appreciation Week, a special time of the year to honor and acknowledge the amazing EVS staff at UNMC and Nebraska Medicine. In a complex health care environment, we heavily depend on them, though they are often unrecognized.<\/p>\n

EVS performs a lot of often thankless tasks: cleaning toilets, continually cleaning up the salt we track in each winter, even wayfinding. All those things we take for granted but definitely notice when they’re not done. They also take out the trash — all of it. Did you know that in the last year almost 8 million pounds of waste (equivalent to the weight of 24 blue whales, the largest animals on earth) has left this campus? All of that has been handled by the person who cleans your area.<\/p>\n

Recycling is an important part of the med center’s goals, and EVS is happy to help, even though it creates extra steps for them. I hope you understand the health, economic and pollution benefits of recycling<\/a>; it’s so much more than meeting a goal, and that makes this week the perfect time to thank EVS for the work they do.<\/p>\n

Of that almost 8 million pounds of waste, we recycled 2.25 million pounds, equivalent to the weight of 885 Mini Cooper cars, hauled out of our spaces in four distinct streams (paper, plastic\/metal, cardboard, trash). It gets better — from 2010 to the present, we have recycled 11 million pounds, equivalent to the weight of 542 F-16 fighter jets.<\/p>\n

At any opportunity, whether this week or next month, please take time to acknowledge and thank an EVS employee for their extraordinary contribution to our many successes. You also can ensure items are getting recycled while helping them to do their job by:<\/p>\n