Reducing waste in blood banking

In a recent interview with dvm360, Margo Mosher, global head of sustainability for Mars Veterinary Health, discussed how the BluePearl Blood Bank program is working to reduce waste and improve efficiencies to benefit patients and the environment. The interview was recorded at the North American Veterinary Community’s 2025 Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMX) in Orlando, Florida, where Mars Veterinary Health presented an educational session, “How to Practice Sustainable Veterinary Medicine,” that addressed the company’s sustainability initiatives such as efforts made through blood banking.

The following is a transcript of the video:

Margo Mosher: We're really proud of our blood bank initiative that Blue Pearl has been championing. And, as you know, blood is a really critical supply for treating pets in need, and they've been doing an amazing effort to create community blood banking. This has helped ensure a supply of blood when it's needed, but also has some really great waste benefits to it.

So, by sourcing blood more locally, we can make sure that it is being used when it's needed. Blood does expire, and one of the challenges is making sure that we can get it where it's needed quickly enough, before it has expired. And so, by sourcing through their community efforts, we've been able to have really better inventory management of the blood and [are] tracking it more effectively to make sure we know when it's coming up on expiration. [We] can then notify our local clinics and get it there in time for it to be used. That's been a really big benefit of the community blood banking.

The other aspect is, because it's more local, we can also reduce our shipping in many instances. Rather than sourcing it from many miles away and having to bring it on refrigerated trucks, we can do shorter mileage, because it is more community based to get it where it's needed with just less driving, which obviously is a great climate change win by reducing those miles driven.