“Engineering is a fantastic major because this is the one area where you can blend creativity, critical thinking and hands-on problem solving to address real-world challenges,” she says
- Program:
- Campus: Okanagan
Civil engineering doctoral student Saba Saleem is developing a decision support tool to help health-care professionals incorporate environmental considerations when treating patients with advanced kidney disease or kidney failure.
Chronic kidney disease affects approximately one in 10 people, with around 30,000 Canadians requiring dialysis because their kidneys are no longer able to filter waste from the blood. Although dialysis is a critical life-saving treatment, it also carries significant environmental impacts, including high carbon emissions as well as substantial energy and water consumption.
Saba’s research aims to quantify the environmental impact of different treatment options for kidney failure and provide a deeper understanding of the environmental footprint of each option.
“I am working on developing a tool that helps integrate environmentally informed decision-making in kidney care practices,” she explains.
“Specifically, this tool will support health-care providers and decision-makers to incorporate more environmentally conscious approaches when considering options like kidney transplants and dialysis.”
Understanding the environmental costs of dialysis
People with kidney failure may require dialysis while they wait for a kidney transplant. The most common mode of dialysis is hemodialysis, which requires travelling to a dialysis centre and being hooked up to a machine three times a week for at least four hours at a time while the machine filters and purifies the blood.
Another option is peritoneal dialysis, which is done daily, with the blood cleaned inside the body using the abdomen as a filter. This treatment can be performed at home and does not require frequent visits to dialysis centre.
Saba’s research is assessing the environmental impact of the three most common modes of treating kidney failure: hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis and kidney transplant.
She’s also looking at different subcategories within each type of dialysis, assessing the life-cycle impacts of various technologies and materials. To conduct her research, she collects primary data from dialysis centres, engages with health-care professionals, reviews provincial reports and regulations on the management of these treatments, and uses software tools to develop models and explore optimization strategies.
“By looking at the different modalities, we can identify the hot spots of high emissions and high resource use to see how we can incorporate environmental cost of care into overall clinical decisions, without compromising patient care,” she says.
Her initial findings reveal that hemodialysis generates up to 10 times more carbon emissions than kidney transplants, largely due to its high travel requirements, as well as substantial water consumption. Peritoneal dialysis, often performed at home, has lower carbon emissions. Kidney transplants are the most preferable option, offering both the best clinical outcomes and the lowest environmental footprint.
Watch a three-minute video on Saba’s research.
A tool that can be applied across multiple areas
Life cycle assessment is a methodology that engineers use to assess the environmental impact of a product over its entire life cycle, from the point of extraction of raw materials through to the product’s end of life.
UBC is a leader in this area, and the Life Cycle Management Laboratory at UBC Okanagan is the only one of its kind in Western Canada focusing on life cycle assessments of the built environment, including urban development, energy systems, water, industrial products and construction.
Saba is working on her degree under the supervision of Dr. Rehan Sadiq and Dr. Kasun Hewage, the leaders of the lab. Saba’s interest in life-cycle assessment is not new. In fact, she came to UBC from Pakistan to complete a master’s degree focusing on how life-cycle assessment methodologies could be applied to disaster response.
Life Cycle Management Laboratory Dr. Rehan Sadiq
“The way we manage oil spills can have detrimental effects on the environment,” she says.
Her research, conducted with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, led to the development of a framework for assessing the environmental impact of different oil spill response waste management strategies so decision makers could choose more sustainable management practices.
Read her master’s thesis: Evaluation of offshore oil spill response waste management assessment-based framework. After completing her master’s degree, Saba worked with Vancouver Coastal Health, where she recognized there was an opportunity to apply the tool of life cycle assessment to the health-care industry.
Watch the talk we had with Saba Saleem (starts at 27:18):
Engineering supports sustainable practices
“Engineering is a fantastic major because this is the one area where you can blend creativity, critical thinking and hands-on problem solving to address real-world challenges,” she says.
Saba’s area of research and practice also reminds us that engineers can have a profound difference in many different areas.
“We often think of engineering as building things – whether that’s infrastructure or machines – but there are diverse career opportunities across many industries in driving innovation, designing solutions that improve quality of life and working on big issues like climate change and sustainability.”
