Michel Perreault fastidiously recuperates all kinds of objects headed from St-Mary’s Hospital to landfills — from batteries to hospital beds.
Michel Perreault’s official title — environmental technician and technician in sustainable development, transport and waste management at the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal — is a mouthful. It’s perhaps simpler to call him the health authority’s most committed recycler, or its most inventive salvager.
Perreault is based at St. Mary’s Hospital, part of Montreal’s West Island health authority. For more than 15 years, he has been quietly, fastidiously recuperating and diverting objects otherwise destined for the garbage or landfills and recycling or repurposing them — from discarded beds to piles of single-use sterile cloth used just once to wrap surgical instruments for sterilization. Because of his efforts, 200 to 300 tons of medical equipment has been kept from the dump and considerable sums previously spent on waste disposal saved.
“As soon as I see something, I ask myself what it could be used for,” said Perreault, who is assisted only by a small team of volunteers.
“I accumulate things. I see a second life in everything,” he said. “I am a thinker. I like to create programs and put them into place.”
Perreault, 65, has worked at St. Mary’s since the 1980s, starting as a dental technician and moving through the health and safety department before taking on his current job.
“Why the environment? It’s a passion. I do what I do because I am passionate about it. I saw lots of loss and lots of waste. Here we focus on waste reduction,” he said. “I do it because there is a real need for it to be done — and because the time to talk is past: We have to take action.”
At home, Perreault composts, collects rainwater to water plants, tries to buy responsibly and donates clothing he no longer wears to thrift shops.
“I’m a good citizen and I try to apply what I know,” he said. “But we can always be better.”
Hospitals might discard old beds because they are replaced with new ones, said Perreault in an interview in the basement at St. Mary’s, where piles of mattresses and disused furniture lined one corridor and items including piles of sterile cloth and bins holding discarded batteries were set along a wall in another. (He tests the batteries to make sure they are still functional.)
“The beds can be 30 or 40 years old, but they still work,” he said. “Also, for some models there are no more parts, so they stop working or else function only manually and orderlies and nurses don’t want to use them.”
The CIUSSS expects 520 new beds this summer in weekly deliveries of 15 or 20, said Perreault, who has been working to find homes for the old ones: He has sourced a not-for-profit organization that picks them up and sends them to countries in Africa as well as to Egypt and to Honduras.
He has given old beds, along with intravenous bags and syringes with recent expiration dates, to nursing programs for use in teaching and training. He has donated stretchers to St. Joseph’s Oratory for the faithful to rest, he said, and contacted shelters for unhoused people to offer them everything from mattresses to dishes.
Some medical equipment that has been declared surplus, including incubators and wheelchairs, is sold and reused, kept for parts or sold as scrap, Perreault explained. Proceeds from sales go into a green fund registered with the CIUSSS, said Perreault; the money has underwritten the planting of more than 1,000 trees by him and employee volunteers on the grounds of five CIUSSS establishments and the installation of 10 beehives on its hospital roofs. Creams, soaps and lip balms incorporating honey from the hives are produced and sold in the cafeteria at St. Mary’s.
Some items awaiting repurposing or recycling are stored at St. Mary’s in an area known as the “green zone,” including materials collected by volunteers from bins set up around the hospital.
Perreault collects sheafs of 8-1/2-by-11-inch paper that is blank on one side and has nothing confidential on the other and has it cut into four sections that are glued along one edge to fashion small notepads. And if disused vials that once held injectable medicines previously ended up in sealed containers for bio-medical waste that institutions paid to have removed, they no longer do. The vials’ glass or plastic, aluminum rings and rubber stoppers are separated by one of Perreault’s volunteers and the aluminum is sold as scrap to raise money for the hundreds of wheelchairs that have been given away through a foundation started by a Quebecer; Clermont Bonnenfant vowed that, if he survived a motorcycle accident in 1986 in which he was gravely injured, he would help others — and he has.
The CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal is not the only local health authority with a sustainable development and waste-reduction mandate: The others, including the CIUSSS du Centre-Ouest de l’Île-de-Montréal and the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, also have them. But only the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal has Perreault.
In March, his contributions were recognized with the National Assembly Medal, presented by Mont-Royal–Outremont MNA Michelle Setlakwe, accompanied by Economy and Energy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon and Nathalie Roy, president of the National Assembly. In a tribute, CIUSSS president and CEO Dan Gabay called Perreault and his work “a shining example” of sustainable development.
In June, Perreault helped to initiate yet another project, the Music Box, at Ste. Anne’s Hospital in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. Used devices in good condition including iPods, MP3 players and wireless headphones are to be deposited in a repurposed cabinet that once held confidential documents. The devices are intended for older adults with such neurocognitive disorders as dementia: Research has shown that music is an effective way to alleviate some of the negative effects of these conditions and to bring comfort.
There are more projects on his wish list. He’d like to set up a registry of surplus furniture and other items that CIUSSS facilities have on hand so they can be sent where they are needed. He wants to establish an ecocentre with people with intellectual disabilities who are served by the Centre de Réadaptation de l’ouest de Montréal. And he’d love to set up community gardens for CIUSSS staff.
“I have a wonderful team of volunteers,” Perreault said. “I would like to have more.
“I am my first volunteer: What I need is three Michels.”