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You don’t need to be in a hospital for very long before you realise that they are like little cities, with their own ecosystem. And it turns out those ecosystems have been pumping out a hell of a lot of greenhouse gas into the wider world.

Helena Vesty has been looking into how Nitrous Oxide - better known as laughing gas - has been leaking from pipes in hospitals even though it’s hardly used as an anaesthetic anymore.

She found that Manchester’s hospitals were failing to use 99 per cent of the substance, despite lorry-loads being dropped off at the city’s hospitals each week.

“How does waste like that even happen without anybody noticing?” asks consultant anaesthetist Cliff Shelton.

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