Ellen Barth

River Shannon and I have been together since December 2023, and we’ve had quite the journey so far! “River” is my first off-track Thoroughbred (OTTB), and I adopted him from the Secretariat Center in Lexington, Ky. I explained to Shelley Mann, Director of the Secretariat Center at the time I adopted him, that I had recently retired my heart horse from competition, so my new project horse would have pretty big shoes to fill.

Operating rooms contribute greatly to hospital waste and greenhouse gas production. Efforts to “green the operating room” have focused on the 5R’s of sustainability: reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink, and research. We propose a “6th R” —repurposing— as simple yet effective means of addressing operating room waste. Clean, non-reusable surgical supplies were collected from a satellite facility of a children’s hospital during a six-week pilot program.