In Alaska and across Providence’s family of organizations, caregivers work to re-use, donate and compost waste to reduce emissions
Providence’s facilities in Alaska are developing innovative ways to reduce waste, both with its own initiatives and with community partnerships.
This summer alone, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage will hold its third annual event for teachers to take any office supplies no longer needed at the hospital. In addition, the hospital will partner with Anchorage Museum in June to hold its first-ever ‘trashion show,’ where discarded items will become model attire. Beyond specific events, Providence’s smaller hospitals in Valdez, Seward and Kodiak Island have developed community partnerships to compost their food waste.
“This is something our caregivers ask me about all the time,” said Darcy Moxon, sustainability manager, Providence Alaska. “I tell everyone I can, ‘if you have something you don’t need anymore but it still works, let’s see where we can find a new home for it.’ I’ve been trying to build connections with other organizations in Anchorage and around Alaska; it’s all been very organic and word-of-mouth.”
Some of these strategies are unique to Alaska, while others, such as food waste composting, are in practice in other regions across Providence’s seven-state footprint. And while Providence Alaska donates unused medical supplies to Alaska Medical Missions, other Providence regions donate similar items to Medical Teams International.
Other Providence strategies include:
- Give-away rooms, where caregivers bring items they don’t want and take anything they can use.
- Scrub exchanges, where caregivers bring scrubs they don’t use anymore or pick up scrubs they can use.
- Donations of usable items to animal shelters and local veterinarians.
- Donation of opened medical supplies to health career education programs and simulation labs.
- Technology reuse program, where Information Services refurbishes laptops and make them available internally for $50.
- Recycling programs for blue wrap from surgical instruments.
Waste reduction and re-use is a key component of Providence’s effort toward carbon negative by 2030. In 2025, Providence reduced waste to landfills by 1.2 million pounds, composted 3 million pounds of food waste, recycled more than 22 million pounds of materials, and avoided discarding 1.8 million pounds through smarter purchasing and reuse.
“Reducing waste disposal doesn’t give us the biggest impact toward carbon negative, but avoiding the production of waste, through efficient purchasing and less consumption, makes a huge impact. Also, waste is top of mind because it’s something that every caregiver touches every day,” said Beth Schenk, chief environmental stewardship officer, Providence. “We work on waste avoidance by choosing reuseable products over single-use, disposable products, reprocessing, smart purchasing decisions, and reusing all we can. When we reduce consumption, we reduce costs. Overall, our environmental stewardship projects save tens of millions of dollars a year. This is a win-win for the planet and for healthcare.”
Providence Alaska’s situation is unique because of a lack of recycling and composting programs compared to other Providence regions, Moxon said. In response, Moxon and her team have worked with other caregivers and community partners with similar environmental priorities to build their successful programs.
“One of our caregivers said his wife is a teacher who would benefit from three-ring binders that we don’t need anymore, and we had a whole stack of them,” Moxon said. “Then his wife said if we opened this up to teachers throughout Anchorage, they could use a lot of our office supplies. We already had a re-use room in one of our medical buildings where caregivers bring office items they don’t need anymore, so we invited the teachers to come see what they could use.”
Providence Alaska is hosting its third annual teacher surplus donation day this summer. Teachers come away with about 3,000 pounds of re-usable items, from binders and other office supplies to chairs and file cabinets.
They are also teaming up with the Anchorage Museum to host the inaugural Refashioned haute trash runway show, featuring items from the hospital and other partners.
“I got the idea from another Providence ministry, where caregivers made outfits out of blue wrap for Earth Day,” Moxon said. “I wanted to bring that here, and the Anchorage Museum has very similar environmental goals as us, so I pitched the idea to them and they loved it.”
The museum has incorporated the upcoming show into its workshop programming, offering design workshops up to the event on June 11.
Items from Providence Alaska include bedsheets, patient gowns, lab equipment, banners and other out-of-date marketing materials.
“My dream would be for all the outfits on the runway to be made out of things that come from Providence,” Moxon said.
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